The joys of working from home is that anytime there is a major crisis there is always a very cute little girl outside playing on the deck or swimming in the paddling pool ready to provide a great distraction.
This past couple of weeks have been particularily challenging. Sophia has given and received a great many cuddles whilst complex problems were solved............

I have been the proud maintainer of a beautiful computer that myself and a great fellow geek friend Glen Roberts built ourselves in 2001. At the time it was a ground breaking machine, and I had to wait for months for the latest components to be released and imported. It even came with state of the art 3D glasses for an over the top gaming experience (I am still yet to play a game.....). Last week it died.

Since getting back from Taupo it has only started once. Every day I would turn it on in the hope that the magical computer fairies had stopped by and made it all work again whilst I briefly slept.
Every morning the same process. Come over to the office, turn it on and wait, and wait and wait. It just wouldn't get past the windows loading screen. Panic started to set in.Not too much panic, but enough to consume most of last week desparately trying to get it back on it's feet.

Fortunately this old computer is no longer my primary working computer. I have kept it running as an email,accounting and backup computer. When Denny comes after school I sacrifice my new quadcore beast and work on the old computer. I had a dream to restore it to it's former glory and manufacture some free time to play some of those cool 3D games I have never had the chance to load up. One day..........

Well that one day nearly never came. Everything I tried failed. I pulled the whole thing apart and gave it a good clean, right down to dismantaling the fans and putting new coolant paste where it ought to go, I then tried replacing the graphics card as the fan on that was making a funny noise. No luck. I even relented and took it into Call A Geek for a diagnostic checkup but they couldn't find anything tragically wrong. They said they checked the hard drives. It turns out that maybe they only checked one of the hard drives, or the C Drive gave it one last gasp just for them.

All weekend I have been swapping hard drives around, testing them, and taking backed up files off and resorting them for long term storage. It is fantastic that you can now purchase a 1 terrabyte (thats 1000 gigabytes!) external hard drive from Warehouse Stationery for just $180. That is pretty good piece of mind and 1TB takes a while to fill up, even for me. Prognosis - the hard drive which runs the computer (the C drive) has died. Sad but it had a good life. 9 years old - thats about 140 human years I would imagine! Most hard drives it turns out have a "designed to fail" aspect to them built in - silicone based lubricants. They evaporate over time and heat and then just stop doing their job, causing a catastrophic hardware failure (so the internet says). I feel fortunate insome weird way, but this still doesn't ease the pain.

Back Up your important things!

I feel fortunate that before going away I took a fairly extensive backup of the working files on that computer - well so I thought. Although I had backed up all of my working files, personal files, photos, music etc etc what I hadn't backed up was probably the most important to most businesses - my emails. Getting to these files is tricky. There are instructions for this in the Clients Area. It is simple once you know how, but a pain to do so I only occassionally did it.
What to do now? Howtdo get to those files on a dead hard drive. You wouldn't believe it if I told you what I am about to do........more to come.