Sunday, November 6, 2005 - Sun, 6 Nov 2005

I spent most of the week plugging away on Behold.

Then yesterday morning, a computer problem/disaster. At 1:30 a.m., my older daughter wakes me up in a panic, that her computer is dying. I run over and we try to boot it again and we can smell something burning. I try to copy her data files over to my machine, but her computer shuts off. It appears the system board got fried. I assure her that all her data is probably still okay on the hard drive.

Her eMachines computer is 2 years old. I can get it fixed (i.e. get the system board replaced) but that will take time and she can’t be without one during school, and I don’t know if she (or I) will trust that same computer again.

So I spend a couple of hours researching other possibilities. Finally I find a good deal at Future Shop for a Compaq desktop that will give her more of everything than she had at a reasonable price. I head for bed at 4 a.m. About 11 a.m., I pop over to Future Shop and pick one up. The goal is to have her up and running by the afternoon.

In a couple of hours, everything was set up. Now all that was necessary was to get the data from the old drive. My idea was to add it as a 2nd hard drive. I was shocked when that computer had a number of open slots but did not seem to have a place I could mount the drive. I phoned Hewlett Packard technical support. They finally told me that model was not designed for a 2nd drive.

So I then thought I’d take out the 2nd drive in my computer (10 GB) and put her old one (80 GB) in. But after 2 hours of trying, fiddling with Bios settings, ensuring the jumpers are set, mounting and remounting, checking the cables, I couldn’t get my computer to see it, even though the Bios knew it was there. Finally I found something on the Internet on Troubleshooting Master/Slave Problems that effectively said “Normally the newer drive will need to be the master.” Her drive was a 2 year old 80 GB drive. Mine was older and was 60 GB.

By now it was 5 p.m. I figured it best just to copy everything from her old drive to a “Old Computer Stuff” directory on her new drive. I linked up the new drive without mounting it (because there was nowhere to do so) and started a copy. It was not too long before it gave me the message “Folder is not accessible. Access is denied.”

Now what was going on? It appeared it was a permissions problem. Any files or directories that Windows secured did not appear to be accessible. This included her very important “My Documents” folder. I had to change all the folder and file permissions by going into Safe Mode, logging in as Administrator (thank goodness that no password worked or I would have been dead), and changing the permissions, and from Safe Mode copying these files to her new drive. The copy procedure in Safe Mode takes an eternity. I was up until 1 a.m. and this morning I will finish off the job. She’ll be up and running this afternoon, and I’ll be ready for a good dose of stress relief.

Needless to say, yesterday I didn’t get all that time I hoped for to work on Behold. I may get some time today, or I may just go for a walk and get back to it tomorrow.