Expectations

Expec­ta­tions are a dan­ger­ous thing.

On the one hand, when they are cor­rect they can greatly speed up your process giv­ing you some­where to begin and allow­ing you to forgo many ques­tions and tests in terms of fig­ur­ing out the sit­u­a­tion. Or, when your expec­ta­tions are wrong, it can cost you valu­able time.

Sun­day I woke up, ready to edit and pro­duce Man­a­Na­tion for the next day, but I dis­cov­ered some­thing. My com­puter had frozen and would not boot, ask­ing me for a bootable disk to be inserted, and I could hear one of the hard­drives pro­duc­ing the ‘click of death.’ A small click­ing sound that indi­cates the read­ing arm is bro­ken or stuck and thus the hard drive is near­ing death.

My machine (Mace II, named for Mace Windu, yes I’m a geek) has three hard dri­ves. C: is the main drive where all the action hap­pens. Oper­at­ing Sys­tem, pro­gram files, my doc­u­ments, mp3 col­lec­tion, etc. D: is my stor­age drive for movies, big apps, some back­ups. O: is for Man­a­Na­tion stuff exclu­sively. I also use an exter­nal hard drive to run back­ups and for trans­port­ing Man­a­Na­tion video files.

I shut the machine off and, assum­ing it was my C:, main hard drive, since the machine would not boot. So I ordered a new hard drive rushed from NewEgg. In the mean­time I pro­duced a low qual­ity video with my Flip cam­era and had it run on Mon­day instead of the sched­ule episode.

Yes­ter­day the new hard drive arrived. After work I got home and set up the new hard drive, booted with a Win­dows XP CD and installed the OS. It took about an hour, K and I took our evening walk dur­ing the time, and then after it booted up I went to install Mozilla Fire­fox only to see some­thing peculiar.

It was try­ing to install Fire­fox to the G: drive. For those not used to Win­dows machines, Win­dows is almost uni­ver­sally on C: drive. This comes from the days when you would have an A: and B: drive for floppy disks, so C: fell to the hard drive. It’s not required but it’s the stan­dard. When I inves­ti­gated fur­ther I dis­cov­ered that the drive I had just installed was indeed the G: drive and that the C: drive was my old main hard drive. The one which had died was my mid­dle hard drive, D: drive.

This was good news on many counts: first it meant a quick fix. I just had to fix the jumper­ing on the hard dri­ves and it would boot into the main drive again, restor­ing order to the uni­verse. Sec­ond it meant a huge reduc­tion in needed time to rebuild my machine and re-install the appli­ca­tions. And thirdly it meant that there was min­i­mal crit­i­cal data loss. I’m fairly good about back­ups, but I had got­ten lax on back­ing up files that weren’t Man­a­Na­tion or web projects.

The main thing that bugs me, is that if I had checked which drive was dead, I would have found out that I could remove it (tem­porar­ily) and booted the machine nor­mally, thus sav­ing myself the delay on Man­a­Na­tion. Alas, les­son learned and I can only make a promise to myself to check which hard drive died before rush­ing to replace the whole oper­at­ing sys­tem and drive.

But, all is well in the world. Mace II is back on his feet, with a bit more stor­age space, and I learned to always check my expec­ta­tion when there would be over