War with HG Wells

There's a war

And that war is between two worlds. In a few hours I'm going to catch the afternoon matinee of S.Speilburg's version of War of the Worlds. Roger Ebert was naysaying the movie. He thinks the movie is too much like the book version. Honestly, that's what I was looking for. I want aliens stomping around on tripods of death. Though Ebert may have a point in saying the tripods of death would be more believable if the movie were to take place in the late 1800's like the book.

-Bacteria saves the day

Computer play

I've been messing around with my computer, playing with my 15Gb hard drive. Messing around with Linux. It turns out my 15Gb drive has died. The head is off alignment and clicks every available random interval. To really test this I had Kubuntu installed on it three times. And that was a 5 hour install every time (5 hours due to the broken hard drive). When Kubuntu satisfied my theory that the drive was b0rken I then proceeded to put Suse 9.1 pro on there. That didn't work either. Broken hard drive.

Now I've booted from a Win98 floppy and have removed the partitions on the 15Gb drive. Now I'm setting up a large partition on it and am going to format the drive. One last test, I'm going to see if WinXP can get the drive working as it should (I doubt it, but this is an exhaustive test). I still hear random clicking, though, during the (very slow) partition sequence. Finally, when I see just how dead this drive is, I'm going to format my 120Gb and start fresh with that. I wouldn't bother with the reinstallation of WinXP on the 120Gb drive but I kinda screwed up.

Here's what I did. I mounted my 120Gb hard drive to the Kubuntu OS installed on the 15Gb hard drive. When I didn't think it had worked, instead of umounting it, I rm -r it. When I realized it shouldn't take 4 seconds to recursively remove an empty directory I cancelled that, unknowingly just what it was I had erased.

Surprisingly every thing I tried in the WinXP drive (upon booting up in Windows again) worked! It would take a long time before I find whatever was (partially) erased. It could be a game, half an episode of HackTV, etc. Except when I went to defrag, had to run Windows scan-disk and found a few cross-ref'd files. I assume scan-disk fixed that, so I then went on to the defrag. Unfortunately my 120Gb hard drive seemed to die then. (This was yesterday). I came back to my computer and was greeted with a blue screen. Not a BSoD, just a plain blue screen. An unexplained, something-has-happened-but-as-the-computer-I-won't-tell-you-what blue screen. So I shut down the computer hard, in the middle of an unfinished defragmentation.

When I tried to boot the computer up again, it really didn't want to. My BIOS couldn't find the hard drive on the IDE cable, but it could find the slave, 15Gb. I felt the hard drive and it was hot. Defragging a large hard drive in a warm room with a case that's clogged with bits of cat hair (damned cats and their shedding). I'm thinking the drive just got too hot and shut itself down preventatively. I waited for the drive to cool and Lo! It recognizes and boots up. The Western Digital diagnostic tool says the 120Gb drive is perfect. It says the 15Gb drive sucks.

I've backed up all the important bits I need to reinstall WinXP on the 120Gb drive. Tomorrow, after I'm done playing with the 15Gb, I'll format the 120Gb and reinstall WinXP with another partition for Linux and Swap.

-Crossing my fingers, toes and eyes