too late to recover. garbled characters. ugh...

found some fragments.....

i'm certainly not going to bother rescripting it. that took months. it's not worth it.

well, now that i'm forced to, i'm going to try and upgrade to 64 bit. all my scripts were for a 32 bit xp. some of the drivers have updated over the last several years, too, which was the other problem.

maybe it'll help offset the bloat.

scripted, that machine was super fast. it's only a 3.6 dual core, but it's way faster than this brand new five core hp laptop bogged down by windows 7. i was proud of that...

and, as mentioned, it was supposed to be modular. as depressed as i am right now, i'm really mad at myself for not backing it up yesterday afternoon. i would merely be annoyed right now, had i done that.

*sigh*.

in my defense, it wouldn't have been easy to back this stuff up. the script partition was 40 gb of software, the temp partition was 20 gb of iso files and avis.

further, most of my script partition is backed up in the storage drive, so i haven't lost much actual software. it's the script i lost, but i suspect i may have something close to it somewhere. i couldn't have backed up that much data onto a disc. and the reason it isn't imaged onto a series of ten or fifteen dvds is that i liked the flexibility of a script. who wants to go through 20 dvds every month?

...and the temp drive was just that. it was sitting there awaiting back-up to an external hd, once i got one big enough to hold all my music files. i was going to put that drive away somewhere.

further, everything that was on the temp drive is backed up across a dozen dvds - *except* the videos (some of which are on this laptop) and the remastered or modified files, which are all up at bandcamp. i can redo this, minus a handful of minor differences that if lost are lost. but, dammit...

no. that drive's dead.

but i'm going to have to let it sit until april, anyways. maybe somebody at a data recovery shop will be able to get what i want out of it.

or maybe that's long enough to let it think it's back at the factory. that's ultimately what i think happened to the magically reworking laptop.

until then, i'm going to have to just keep going. i have one more trick to try - maybe it'll read through an external sata in. if not, i'm going to wait until i see if i can recover the data before i start downloading gigs of wave files from bandcamp.

here's some hope: windows knows there's a disc plugged in. it says it's "unknown", but it at least knows it's there. that's more than the bios can say. so, i'm going to throw on a temp install and see if it reads it...

i had a problem with my laptop's hard drive last month that in the end turned out to be a corrupted mbr. regarding the laptop, it was minor in the end cause....just reformat and that's that. but i cannot format this drive under any circumstance. and i even don't care about the hardware. it's almost ten years old. i don't think 250 gb drives are even on the market anymore.

it's doing something very strange that is both worrying me and giving me some hope. it's only reading the empty drive if the failing one is not plugged in. i mean at a bios stage. i've reset the cmos and it's not helping.

so i'm going to start swapping cords around. i don't see why plugging in the failing hard drive should stop me from reading a functional one.

if it's a board problem, that's a bigger issue. but it might mean i can get the info off. which is what's important. i can replace a dead drive relatively easily. i can't replace some of what's on it without a great deal of effort.

i spoke too soon. the drive is not reading at all. i should have taken the data off while i had the chance.

the c: partition is designed to be throwaway. there are two smaller partitions that are not. one is an install partition with reinstall scripts. the other is a temporary partition that currently holds all of my temporary recording material.

i think i can reconstruct the last one, although it will be a lot of work. that's the most important, by far. i can't reinstall the machine as it is without the second, but i can get around that.

it could conceivably cost me a month. so i'm hoping i can get the data off somehow.

lesson learned: a chkdsk may stop a hard drive from whirring, but it doesn't mean it's fixed it. and i should have worried about it.

grargh.

so, i'm going quiet here *again* for the foreseeable future. *sigh*.

that was a scare. hard drive started whirring on me....

it would have mostly been an annoyance. i built the pc to be modular. 1 tb total memory, over four 250 gb hard drives. rather than use something like raid, i've just left one empty. if a drive begins to die, and this hasn't happened yet, the plan is just to copy it over to the empty drive, unplug it and replace it. worst case, i might have to reinstall, but the process is automated.

as it is, a chkdsk stopped the whir and i'm not going to worry myself about it. but i blew the morning on that...

well, i got the stuff printed on monday, then spent 6 hours walking on tuesday to finish up most necessary spring shopping, did spring cleaning (and much sleeping) on wednesday in the midst of a horrific blizzard and should get a start on the track today, after i do my taxes, duck student loan repayments for another six months and fill out some other necessary paperwork.

don't get me wrong. i appreciate the six hundred some dollars i'm getting back from rent. it's almost a month of rent. in theory, that's substantial.

but, if the government thinks it's doing me or the economy a favour by dividing it by twelve and giving me $50/month for the year, it's really sadly mistaken. what i'd like to do is spend the money on furniture. bookshelves and tables, specifically. at $50 a month, it's going to take all year to do something i'd rather do quickly. it's going to mean i'm going to have to save the money up over the course of a few months and probably go shopping every two months or so with roughly $100.

....except that it's a virtual certainty that i'm not going to do that. instead, i'm going to waste it on nothing of any importance, and mostly on items that are not taxable due to repressive laws.

i'm well aware that the idea is to prevent low income people from wasting it on drugs, or beer and popcorn, but whomever thought that up has obviously never been low income or done drugs, or drank beer and ate popcorn. there's not much chance i'm going to spend $650 all at once. that would be pretty much smoking myself stupid. however, there's a pretty good chance i'm going to pitter away what is more or less smoke money, at $50/month. the way to stop me from pissing it away is to give it to me all at once so i can spend it; the way to have me waste it is to give it to me in monthly installments that aren't enough to buy anything with.

as policy, it's just not very intelligently thought through.

i'm actually considering not claiming the energy credit, so the refund is under $360 and it just comes in in one chunk.

now, that's this year, when i just moved into a new place.

next year, $650 might buy me some gear if it comes in at once. if i played video games (i don't) it might have bought a new system, rather than a new game for an old one every month.

some people could use it to pay down credit card debts. $50/month just keeps them on the interest paying hamster wheel. useless.

...all to try and combat the imaginary problem of people blowing their tax returns on beer by budgeting them monthly beer money instead....

the other options are both more economically useful and more functionally useful.

of course if i was a real economist, i'd say something about investing it somewhere. which is probably true of a small number of people. you'd think that would be what they'd want.

but what i'm irked about is the idea that giving me a small amount will help me spend it more responsibly, because i'm too irresponsible to spend a lump sum. i'll even concede that i'm irresponsible, but they've got the whole thing backwards.

at least give me the choice how to adjust to my inherent irresponsibility, rather than trying to enforce a model of fiscal responsibility on me that is alien to what i know my nature is.

that sort of forced fiscal planning always fails.

likewise, regarding venezuela.