Spent the afternoon and part of the evening mirroring a rapidly-failing hard drive (twice it had popped up the “Unmountable Boot Volume” error, and that means absolutely, positively no access until CHKDSK run off a recovery disk gives an all-clear) onto a replacement (provided by Dell under warranty) at my younger sister’s and future brother-in-law’s. It SHOULD have been about a hour job, but because Dell never did provide a drive-mirroring product and Norton Save and Restore does not quite like bad sectors (one time crashing the computer so badly that it took CHKDSK the better part of an hour to put the old drive back together, and that was without a surface scan), I ended up working through to dinner. It still was better less time-consuming than the alternative, which would have been to do a clean install of everything (and it took 2 tries to get the right OS out of Dell; the first time they sent XP Home SP2 instead of XP Media Edition 2005). The only positive things I can say about Dell this time around are they’ve made their cases tool-free, not only to get into but for hard drives as well; and they sent out a Western Digital 80 GB SATA drive to replace the POS Hitachi 80 GB SATA that couldn’t even last a year.
The payoff dinner was good (at least for a bachelor), and the FBIL and I split 4 games of 4-handed cribbage against my sister and dad (who was there to work on a sink that got damaged due to frozen pipes), but 6 hours in a house with 2 friendly (1 crazy and 1 lapdog rottweiler/shepard mix) dogs finally got to my allergies. Disk Defrag, which began at the start of cribbage, was still running when I left.
