Disaster

So, the summer term started yesterday and I moved back up into halls on Sunday. After plugging in all my computer bits and pieces I turned it on only to find that the mouse didn't move.

Oh, what a catastrophe this turned out to be.

Switching the mouse to another USB port prompted a Found New Hardware dialogue box, so I reinstalled the drivers and then thought I'd reboot since the computer seemed to be very slow to respond to anything. Eventually I lost patience and went for the reset button, which in turn on the reboot prompted my RAID array to start rebuilding itself, since it had detected an improper shutdown. The rebuild slowed down the computer monumentally, and I was advised to leave it alone for another 1-2 hours to let it sort itself out.

1-2 hours later, I noticed that the hard drive activity light had stopped flashing, so I continued reading for another half hour and then went to reboot the computer. It still seemed to have geological response times, so this took about 15 minutes or so. Whereupon it began rebuilding all over again.

I phoned Kevin, who had earlier assured me that if time was pressing there were things that could be done to enable me to access my data sooner rather than later. Time was indeed pressing, since it was now almost 4pm and I had to write the last 300 words of an essay ready to hand in the following morning, so I disconnected the second drive, told the BIOS there was no RAID array, and rebooted. It never even got as far as loading the Windows splash screen, just sat there apparently doing nothing once it had decided to boot from the hard drive. Swapping the two drives around made it a little better — I was presented with an "improper shutdown" Windows screen, but choosing any of the options, even plain Safe mode, caused the computer to think about it for a couple of seconds and then reboot.

Not so good.

Lots of variations and trial and error of the above happened before we decided it was time to try reinstalling Windows. Luckily, to partly protect myself from this sort of thing, I have Windows installed on a separate partition to anything else, so during the installation, I thought, I could just format C: and install there. Unfortunately, the Windows installation couldn't detect my SATA hard drives and asked for a floppy disk with appropriate drivers. A floppy disk. Which I didn't have.

The next bright idea was to get the array to rebuild from within its boot-up configuration screen (rather than from within Windows), but hopes were dashed and confusion reigned when I waited for the "Press F4 to enter RAID utility" line in the start-up, but it never appeared. It had been there earlier...

By about this time it was approaching 6pm and I reluctantly accepted that I would have to head down to the computer labs and rewrite the 1500 or so words of my essay that I'd already done. So I scooted down there and wrote the whole thing at about exam-speed — 1850 words in about two hours.

Later, having returned to my ever-more-frustrating computer, I found that Kevin had realised the configuration utility prompt wasn't appearing in boot-up because we'd told the BIOS that it wasn't a RAID array... changing that finally enabled me to get into the program and start the rebuild. Yay!

It looked like it was progressing at a reasonable pace and would take just over an hour for the whole thing. Which was good, and might leave me with a working computer by 11pm. Except that it froze at 79%. The hard drive was still doing things though, so I left it alone only to find 40 minutes later that it had given up and concluded that I had an invalid set of disks. Ahh. Ahhhhh. This is the Linux partition causing this. When I installed Fedora, we couldn't get it to accept the RAID drivers, so (AIUI) Linux only ever wrote data to one disk instead of both. So when the array tried to rebuild it found this massive discrepancy between the two, and concluded they were too badly synced to rebuild. Hmm.

This led to loading up the Fedora installation CD to use the disk partitioning tool to delete the Linux partitions on each drive. However, once I'd told it what I wanted to do, it objected and told me that it couldn't proceed with the "installation" since I hadn't created a Linux partition... Throughout the process it was complaining about Input/output errors on /dev/sda (the first hard drive), but it still continued through the process when I told it to Ignore.

*sigh*

I had the bright idea of stepping into Linux rescue mode with the installation disc, but once it offered me a prompt I didn't really know what to do with it. And I'm not entirely sure how successful deleting the Linux partition from within Linux would be, so I abandoned it.

The long and short of it (well, it's turned out to be the long of it... hmm... or maybe the long and short put together to make it super-long?) is that a new hard drive's been ordered. Kevin managed to track down the exact model on eBuyer, but since neither of us have an account with them they'd only ship the first order to a credit card billing address (so, either Surrey or Essex, not terribly helpful since I'm 100-150 miles away from either). So Kevin had to ask a eBuyer-account-holding-friend to order it for me and get it sent here instead.

Well, the drive was ordered on Monday and next-day delivery was paid for, though as of last night (Tuesday) it was apparently still sitting in a depot somewhere. Our post only gets delivered at around 1pm-2pm, so possibly about now it's sitting in out post room waiting for me to pick it up...

In the meantime, I've been astounded at just how much I rely on my computer. Without my computer I have no essay-writing or -printing ability, little exam-revision ability (since a lot of the revision material is online), no TV, no DVDs, no episodes of Buffy/Angel/The West Wing which I'm working my way through (again) at the moment, no email, no newsgroups, no blogs, no news, and no ability to multi-task, which my attention-wandering mind appreciates. I would have music through my iPod, but I ran down the battery early on Sunday, and didn't bring the separate charger but only the one that lets you plug it into the FireWire port on the computer, so I'm out of music too.

So, just books then. I know I'm a bit of a bookworm, but I feel like a lapsed bookworm recently. Since starting uni I haven't read more than about one book every 8-10 days or so, and last year I mainly read on the train to and from work. Yesterday I read 230 pages to finish my Jasper Fforde book, and then another 80 or so of the next book. If I keep this up I'll be running out of books that I've brought with me fairly soon, and then I'll have to... what? Buy some more I suppose :-)