Fixed it….

Pulled my soon to be dead drive out. Repurposed one of my external backup drives to be my ‘documents’ drive, and put it back in the tower. Then did a system rebuild and reinstalled everything. Which I’ve just finished…. The other external backup drive is now just the back up drive (which I only need one now that I’ve consolidated folders).

Now let’s see how long this lasts. Windows 11 is coming out is a week or so. But I’m going to hold off on it. Everything works now, and if it works, don’t try to fix it. And more importantly, I want to see if drivers are published first…

It’s dead, Jim….

So after my last post about my hard drive failing, I decided to do a full format of it. Not the quick format. It took almost 18 hours. Then I ran a chkdsk, and it still has bad blocks. So, the hard drive is failing. I can’t afford to replace it yet, and I don’t want to take apart my tower to pull it out. So, like I posted previously, I’m abandoning it in place. I have plenty of space on my other drives, so the world’s not going to end right away….

This is fun….

Ok, another entry will be forthcoming about why I didn’t make it to work Sunday night. But this is a different story. If you remember this past spring, I replaced my 2 4tb hard drives with 2 8tb hard drives. And this past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed issues with one of them. File system errors. the inability to open folders. Ran a chkdsk and everything seemed to be fixed. So I continued to use it. And I noticed more errors. So I decided that it needed a format. Which is why I rebuilt my system last week. And this morning, as I set up my virtual machines, I still noticed the hard drive was giving me errors. So I need to either run a surface scan, or my hard drive is failing. If it’s the worst case scanario, I can’t afford to replace it, and I won’t be able to for a while. But I have plenty of space on my other drives, so for now this drive is going to be ‘abandoned in place’.  Eventually I may fix it, but until then, the world still goes around.

Do not panic.

20 Years Ago...

 20 Years ago, I woke up and saw the second tower get hit. Got out the door, got on the bus to work, and both towers collapsed while on the bus. Got to work right as the last plane crashed. 20 minutes later, everything closed. I'm not going to go into the details (if your Google-Fu is strong, you can rehash what happened).

I will remember the events of that day. By conducting my business as usual today. We must never forget that day. That day 2977 people died for freedom. And I will commemorate them by being free...

A tinge of regret…

So, after I f*cked my computer a couple of weeks ago, I had to order a bunch of parts for it. Enough parts that it would seem like I was getting a new computer. So I also bought a new Windows 10 license (an OEM one, since I built this myself).

Fast forward to Monday night, when I realized that one of my hard drives was giving me errors, and as part of the repair process I formatted it. And since a third of my software was installed on it, I thought it easier to nuke the whole system from orbit. A couple of missteps and restarts later, I got it installed to the point that I could link my local account with my Microsoft account. And then I realized that I didn’t need to buy that OEM license, because it still activated with the original product key that I used when I first built my computer.

So, Microsoft realizes that this is still the same computer. And I didn’t need to buy the OEM license. Oh well. I can’t return it since I’ve already used it. I guess this counts as a ‘lesson learned.’ Don’t buy it unless you absolutely need it…

Purging the desk….

After I added the second monitor, I had to clean the desk a little bit. Just a general de-cluttering. For the past 7 years, there has been some sort of coffeemaker on my desk. First there was the 4 cup minimaker. And then a couple of years ago I got a full sized one that could also do k-cups. I never really brewed the full-sized pot (something to do with it being plugged into the same circuit as the computer and the AC and tripping the breaker in my brother’s room). And today, I realized that I don’t need my stash of tea in my room anymore. So that’s out in the kitchen now. And I’ve just now taken down the TV tray that sat right beside me. I can pull it back out if I need the laptop again, but until then my room doesn’t need the clutter….