Cav's Place

I mentioned a more complete update about what happened during the weekend but didn’t write it. Then again, had something much more important to write about on Monday… Anyway, now you’ll get that update and another one about the hard drive.

Some friends of my parents were supposed to come over for a few hours Saturday afternoon, but they ended up coming Friday evening and leaving Sunday afternoon! And besides having other people around here to worry about bumping into, they were also really acting like it was their own home it seems, or worse.
Besides having more people talking and waking me up Saturday and Sunday morning, there were also annoying things like the guy apparently missing when he pissed and not wiping the toilet seat afterwards, probably a triple quantity of cigarette smoke around the house, opening the bathroom window after they showered and leaving it open so I froze instantly when I went to the bathroom myself later, eating nearly all the bread in the kitchen drawer and not taking more out of the freezer (there’s usually a larger quantity bought at once and stored in the freezer so it won’t get moldy), or putting some poorly packed meat in the same freezer shelf as said bread despite there being plenty of room in the other… I’m afraid to ask if any of them used my tootbrush or anything…
No idea what happened to make them stay this long, but if I’ll never hear of them again it’ll be too soon… Though some good did come out of it, as the guy works in constructions and dad had him look over the mold problem in my room. He stared, whistled, shook his head and said it’s hopeless, that getting rid of it fully is next to impossible once it gets this bad, so he’s thinking about a full insulation of the walls on the inside to at least keep it just on the walls and away from the other things in the room (and my lungs). I think it finally sunk in with dad now that I’m no longer the only one saying that, because he looked quite panicked afterwards.

As for the hard drive, I saved everything I wanted off it, and I do mean everything! I first got what mattered most and then, seeing that it still works, I started looking through everything else and making selections, which I ended up extending several times since I saw there was more space left.
What was used was this 20 Gb drive that also has Windows and a few other programs installed on it, dad’s otherwise half full 40 Gb drive and two flash sticks (1 Gb and 256 Mb, respectively). Spent a couple of days compressing everything to get as much as possible and everything is packed full, but now I can honestly say there’s nothing left unsaved that I might conceivably want back and won’t be able to just download again on the same day I get that drive replaced. If Andra was amusing herself back then by saying it shows I have experience in stuffing big things into tight places when I was putting books people were asking for from that library into boxes, I think managing to stuff the contents of a 160 Gb drive into three quarters of a 20 Gb one, half of a 40 Gb one and two small flash sticks in such a way as not to feel I lost anything at all would illustrate that point even better. (Been told the part about big things in tight places sounds like bragging… I don’t see it like that, just a mental link I made, probably one more bit of evidence about how I connect everything to her.)
Otherwise, the damage consists of 48 bad clusters on the first partition and 12529 on the last one. Oddly enough, those 48 made that first partition appear completely destroyed at first but those 12529 caused no problems on the other. Not only could I access and recover everything from it, but I even wrote on it without any errors. On the other hand, when I tried scanning the first partition with some data recovery software after the bad sectors were already marked (I had already recovered everything I wanted from it, it was just a test), the computer locked up again.
I’m also noticing that it usually spins up two or three times and then clicks very loudly on reboot, before the BIOS sees it. Also that, while it no longer does it every minute or two and no longer locks up the computer for a few seconds whenever it does it, about once every five minutes I hear some sort of vibration coming from it for a few seconds and then that weird sound again. Immediately after I managed to restore the first partition this was happening about once every 10 to 15 minutes, so now it’s getting to be more frequent again.
Since I got everything back, this turned out way better than I thought possible! And it’s better that it decided to fall apart now when I still have some six weeks of warranty left instead of doing it just after it expired. I’m done with it now but I think there’s little point in getting it to the shop on Friday, so it’ll be taken there early next week and we’ll see what happens. I know it could get damaged further by then even if I won’t be doing much with it but I can’t say I’d mind that, would make it more obvious that there’s a problem and I need it replaced…