The Cranium is dead

Luke Leslie 22nd March 2007

I sit here, day 3 into the assault, no I'm not invading Iraq. (say that with an Alan Partridge voice) I am in-fact trying to get back into my computer.

I liken this whole ordeal to being simply locked out of my House. You see, I've learnt a lot about hard drives and data and nerdum etc over the years, but nothing compared to the last 2 days. I know now for example that every hard drive has a 'directory' which is essentially a map of the entire drive, this is then used by your operating system to get to your files and folders. This directory is like a big index, and like an index has a beginning which is the first thing your computer access when you switch it on. After a particularly gut wrenching bout of fan spins, my G5 packed it in, and turned itself off. I sadly announce the following.

The Cranium died - 12:35pm GMT Tuesday 20th of March 2007

This problem affects Mac's, PC's and any technology that uses a hard-drives. So remember this was not a virus, I still feebily cling to the notion Apples just don't get them. What happened is that some specific data went bad leading to my directory being unreadable. This is just part of the reality of using a physical device to hold data, hard drives are far less reliable then RAM memory, and the world will slowly shift away from hard drives in the next 20 years as RAM capacity and price rise and fall respectivly. You can see the begining of it now as more and more devices shift towards flash memory.

I run my HD's 24-7 because I render so much video, and leave things torrenting during the night. Its also a 150 gig drive, which is pretty big, so with that much data inevitably, the drives files will start to degrade, so running the occasional de-fragmentation program helps, something I never did but will do now until the day I die. I still don't know how, or why this happened but apparently my directory got corrupted. I'll probably never know now...

So this meant I couldn't start up my mac, I sat there, fans buzzing, never getting past the apple screen. I was locked out of my own home! Now what can usually be done is you run a tidy little application called 'Disc Warrior' and it actually rebuilds a new directory for you. Apparently it works in almost all cases. To bad I wasn't one of those. Take it as a bad sign when the application has still not made progress in near 24 hours. So I opted for the most gut wrenching, yet last and only choice remaining to me. I used yet another program supplied by my evil genius of an uncle. This one called Data Rescue X. This allows you to explore a 'Fucked' drive, and can rescue data from near even the most fried hard-drive. Its all very Mission Impossible 3. I managed to get lots of key files and folders back. But I was warned that some may be themselves corrupted, as the directory being broken could only access parts of larger files. But I have conceded that I'm going to loose every single application I've ever installed, including my music programs and their reams of loops and instruments. which blows.

So you run the rescue app, but that doesn't fix the problem, it just allows you to get any important passengers on lifeboats, before you inevitably scuttle your own flagship. Wait, no my metaphor was a house wasn't it ... Okay - so in a nutshell, I had to demolish my own house, then rebuild it -before I could get into it again - just because I lost my key! Its not all doom and gloom however, I believe my music, photos and videos and personal works are on my external hard drive, and are untouched. What I'm worried about right now is, I don't think my itunes library copied properly, that means I have the mp3s themselves but all my playlists, ratings and play counts will be 0000. And thats frustrating considering my library now is about 10000 songs.

All this buzzes though my mind as I watch a bar move across my drive, erasing it - and resetting it to how it was when I opened my G5 box some 2 years ago. I'm using my uncles laptop to run all this ridiculously nerdy software, and write this little memo, to remind me and the rest of the world to back up their crucial files, lest this happens to you too! Mullane the man himself was telling me how he had to do the same thing on his PC 2 years ago, so he lost all his photos, thankfully I didn't loose mine, but that's just because i have 3 hard drives - so if one goes down - 2/3 of my data is still good. What's odd about these 3 days is I've been home, with no way of doing video work, graphics or my general computer madness. So I've had to rediscover what I did before I was hooked on monkey-phonics. I'm not that bad however, I went away last summer for over a month, and honestly didn't miss using my computer, but sitting at home, you have to amuse yourself somehow. So I've been playing guitar, reading old books I liked, I even made a model airplane, something I haven't done since 5th year. Shocking - I know, but it reminds me that there's so much more you can do with your time then spend it online.

That might be a lie, but it sounds nice, it sounds like something to tell our grandkids anyway.

Sure It'll beee grrrrrrraaaannnnndddd... It'll be like a new computer now right? nigs.

online since Jan 06

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