A Simple Operation
So there I was, working in a PC as I tend to do. The machine in question was dropping its network connection. I was planning on backing up the data on those drives and then reinstalling the operating system.
First I had to figure out how to get the drives out. This is an old circa ‘98 Gateway system. It is a “Desktop Model” meaning the monitor supposed to actually sit on the machine. This also means that the entire innards are a jigsaw puzzle of screws and slots and holes.
After pulling off the side panel and breaking the plastic snaps right off, I finally figure out the way to best get the CD and hard drives out is by taking off the front panel and attacking from that angle.
Finally I got to the task at hand. I got the hard drives out, hooked them up to another box with a working ethernet card, and set to work on the jumpers.
Jumpers, if you don’t know, are very small pieces of plastic with a sort of metal ring inside which hard drives use to determine how they work. They can be the “Master” drive, the “Slave” drive, and so on.
So after booting unsuccessfully, I turned the machine off, grabbed a jumper with some pliers and…
The machine turned on again automatically. Ack!
With my pliers already on the jumper, I try to pull it out and it’s then I see the spark.
Oh, hell.
The machine immediately cuts off.
Okay then, I say to myself, I’ll just turn it back on as soon as these jumpers are removed…
…but of course it doesn’t turn back on. There is no emergency fuse to flip or replace or switch off. I just fried the power supply with some pliers and a $.10 jumper on the back of a hard drive.
Life’s great sometimes, isn’t it? Now I have to struggle and get the hard drives out of their Steel Housing, something akin to Cockroach-Like Armor (fully capable of surviving nuclear fallout), and try to figure out how the jumpers need to be positioned. I’ll need to put them back in the original machine, and I did not note the jumper configuration before I took them out (my own fault, of course).
Oh, and hey, big thanks to Maxtor for not actually having the diagram for the jumper configuration on the hard drive! I had to Google up Maxtor Hard Drive Jumper Settings to figure out how in the world those jumpers should go in there.
So I had to go back back to the original machine, then I find out that using “Cable Select” doesn’t actually work for both drives, just one drive at a time.
And all I wanted to do was pull out the hard drives to back them up on another machine. A day in the life, I tell you. A day in the life.
My excellent job has given me tomorrow off, so I’ll speak with you wonderful folks on Friday. It has been one ridiculously busy week. Until next time.
Broke your glasses, but it broke the ice
You said that I was an asshole and I paid the price
2 Comments:
Pliers? I guess I'd never have this problem as I always used my fingernails for this job. :-)
I feel your pain. I, too, know the joy of the "autoboot from Hell" and the "spark from the dead machine". At the moment, I am going through the "laptop hard drive follies"-I broke the first one (putting on an IDE adapter-just one of those "the cable doesn't want to go on Ooops! it went on all of a sudden!" moments-all those little pins don't like being bent up at a 70 degree angle, it seems...some days are like that, aren't they), so I bought another-out of my own pocket for the customer, I mean, it was my fault, not theirs, and IT was BAD out of the bubble-wrap-now the THIRD one is sitting on the kitchen table waiting for time to Ghost it with the image I have on an 80GB drive I am just waiting to use once I get the image shifted over....IT, the profession that kills with love. Ya' gotta love it, or you would do something else...
What makes it fun, is that the laptop lives in Mississippi at college, and I am in Alabama, and have to wait until it comes back on break and such to do anything. Very episodic. March was the "Death of the Hard Drive" month-somewhere around 5 or 6 bit the dust either at work or on the side for me, which is pretty high numbers. At least, in the less than 6 year old department. Just my lucky month, I guess. (No, I didn't break them all, the rest just died....)
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home