Cav's Place

I’m more and more convinced I just imagined everything… Seems almost impossible to think I ever had a life, much less any shred of control over it…
Don’t mind me, there’s no point in anything anyway…

While selecting things to save off the failed drive I remembered The Bard’s Tale… Tried playing it when I still had 512 Mb of RAM but it was running too slowly so I gave up, and then when I was left with only 256 Mb it was out of the question, but it got stuck in my mind. I think more games should be that fun!
Yes, I’m one of those who always demands more complexity in games, but every now and then it’s nice to just take a break and play something that’s simply fun, especially if it’s fun because it picks on all the trappings of the other games out there. So why aren’t there a few more like it? Or there are but I just never heard of them?
Either way, I highly recommend it for anybody who simply wants to have some fun while playing a game, and especially for RPG fans since they’ll understand many of the jokes better, knowing what typical RPG aspect the jab is aimed at.

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…

Last night I tried burning two boot CDs on my parents’ computer and then meant to test them here, which made me need to take the computer out of the desk again since I had forgotten to connect the DVD back last time. I didn’t do that last night, but did it this morning, and since I took it out I also switched the hard drives to be able to connect the failed one as slave. Then I tried booting off the CDs and it wouldn’t work, so I guess I didn’t manage to burn them properly…
Since the software solutions seemed exhausted for the moment I thought I might as well try just running it normally one more time like this, with the failed drive as slave. I didn’t try this before because I thought it was the solution that was least likely to work, so I didn’t want to risk damaging it further by trying it, but now…
It was still locking the computer, but after a few reboots I decided to just wait and see how long it will stay frozen like that, since it sounded like it was working on something. A few minutes later it finally displayed a message, saying that it needs to check drive F: (which was what the system partition of the failed drive ended up being). I didn’t let it do that and it seemed to freeze again, but a few more minutes later it finally logged on to Windows and a few minutes after that I could access My Computer and see all the partitions of the failed drive except the system one still intact!
There was some more panic after that because the partitions seemed to keep vanishing. I’d access one and when I’d go back to My Computer I’d see one of the others gone, or I could see it there at first but it’d get crossed out for a moment when I’d try to access it and then vanish. Seemed to be just random, so I opened separate windows for them so I won’t need to keep going back and forth and have to wait for the one I need to show up again… Of course I then quickly saved what I needed most, except the few files I had on my desktop, since I can’t access that, and now I’m trying to see what else I can save.
Actually I could technically save everything, but I don’t have anywhere to put it… I’m trying to see if dad will let me take the hard drive off his computer for a while and stuff it with things from here until I’ll get the failed drive replaced, and then take it again to put them back of course. Still, these two drives have some 40 Gb of free space in between them, making me still need to pick very carefully… Either way, I’m absolutely thrilled I could save what I needed most and do it so easily too!
The computer seems to be running more slowly with the failed drive connected, and about once every minute or two it sounds weird and locks up everything for a few seconds regardless of whether I’m accessing it or not, plus that I’m hearing some sort of hum or vibration, but I could get those things back!!!
The system partition from the failed drive is completely gone, can’t access it at all and it clicks if I try, doesn’t know it’s label, won’t even tell me what size it is, basically it just sees that there’s some space that’s not within any of the other three partitions and assumes there’s a fourth, but that’s as far as it goes with it. If it’ll still be working by the time I finish saving everything else I can fit anywhere, since I’m thinking it’s better to get everything else first as it could probably cause further problems if it’s physically damaged and I try accessing that area too much, I’ll try running some diagnostics on it and see if I can recover what I had on my desktop too… Then, either way that goes, I think I’ll wipe all the other three partitions, just to be on the safe side, and send it to the shop it was bought from to be replaced.
Bottom line, I’m just dancing around here! Silly me for not doing this sooner!

You might have noticed the site was down, sorry about that but it wasn’t my fault, I heard there were server problems… My Internet access was also down for about 21 hours… The hard drive is also still down, obviously, since I’m still too afraid to even try to do anything about it…
On another note, some people came here Friday evening and they’re still here, which is of course bringing me down even more than I was already, plus that I’m noticing several nasty things going on… But at least I voted today, went reasonably early to make sure there would be hardly anyone there at the time…
You’ll probably get a more complete update tomorrow, unless something else goes down…