Musings – Abhay S. Kushwaha

One of the reasons I wasn’t actively blogging was the increased workload caused by failure of my primary 120G HDD that I use as my data storehouse in my PC. One day it was working fine, and suddenly the system blue-screened and WinXP told me it had done this to protect my data. Jokes aside about how ironic that was given the number of files I usually have open at any time (data that is gone forever), when I restarted my system, my trusty old BIOS told me that SMART predicted the HDD was going down.

I panicked. I simply took it off, and out of my system and like a good boy in an IT company told the tech support guy what had happened. He, of course, wanted to hook it back in and boot a few times to see if it was still ‘alive’. Anybody with even a little experience with tech support will know they don’t listen. Anybody who’s ever provided any tech support will know there’s no point in listening to the users (hearing and listening to are two different things!). So, after a few attempts, I put my foot down and told the guy there was way too much precious data in the HDD for me to lose because of his experiments. I was given a 40G drive from the office to back up ‘critical’ data. I sourced another 80G to back-up the ‘not-so-critical’ data. 😉 I had another 40G which is already full of ‘somewhat-critical’ data.

With all backups done, the 120G gone for replacement and the four HDDs hooked in, it looked funny. Here are the pics:

This is from the side.

This is from an angle.

Up close and personal.

Obviously, I did it myself with the tech support person giving me moral support whenever I would bump into him. I should’ve been fair and perhaps let him do everything like others though. I’m divided on that.

A few days later, the replacement drive came in. However I had enough work that I didn’t want to spend a few hours shuttling the drives, then data, and then drive letter associations in WinXP. But soon I did. And now I’m back to ‘normal’ (if there is such a thing).

Yes, I have 180G installed in my computer at office.
No, I don’t know what’s on the drives. It’s all encrypted and belongs to an imaginary friend I met on the Internet. 😉