(no subject)
There must be some merit to the thought of one computer problem being contagious to others, whether it is a software issue or a hardware issue. Last week, I had the thought of my mom's computer hard disk drive failing after 10 years of faithful service. Sure enough, three days ago, it started giving the click of death, as well as running slow and taking forever to access data. Somehow, these symptoms were interpreted as the computer having a virus by a layman.
I was not happy about this interpretation causing my mom to try to get me to update virus definitions and run a scan. I could tell immediately such a thing was not going to work. Instead, I took it upon myself to transfer everything over to the other HDD I had installed in the tower in case something like this happened. I also had enough forethought to run a backup recently and that made everything so much easier to restore. This also meant my mom didn't have a complete meltdown about her computer losing itself. Yet, the problem still managed to contaminate my computer.
I was rearranging the orientation of my desk a little. I unplugged the tower and everything else to make moving the desk easier on me. Upon plugging everything back in and turning on the tower, I was greeted with a crash report from the Open Firmware, saying the problem was with either one of the CPUs. I didn't think that was the source of the trouble. I checked the memory to make sure that was not causing a problem. Finally, I removed the main HDD and tried to boot from a CD. This worked. Plugging the HDD and booting from the CD again, I wanted to see what was up in Disk Utility. My HDD was not even registering. It just decided to die. No warnings, no click of death, no slow read-time, no S.M.A.R.T. reporting an error. It was just gone. This means I have to get a HDD. The good news is that I can get one at about 4x the size (from 80 GB to 320 GB) for around $70. It would be easier if I was not dealing with PATA, but my system is just that old; I love it so much.
Maybe I am turning into a computer technophile
I was not happy about this interpretation causing my mom to try to get me to update virus definitions and run a scan. I could tell immediately such a thing was not going to work. Instead, I took it upon myself to transfer everything over to the other HDD I had installed in the tower in case something like this happened. I also had enough forethought to run a backup recently and that made everything so much easier to restore. This also meant my mom didn't have a complete meltdown about her computer losing itself. Yet, the problem still managed to contaminate my computer.
I was rearranging the orientation of my desk a little. I unplugged the tower and everything else to make moving the desk easier on me. Upon plugging everything back in and turning on the tower, I was greeted with a crash report from the Open Firmware, saying the problem was with either one of the CPUs. I didn't think that was the source of the trouble. I checked the memory to make sure that was not causing a problem. Finally, I removed the main HDD and tried to boot from a CD. This worked. Plugging the HDD and booting from the CD again, I wanted to see what was up in Disk Utility. My HDD was not even registering. It just decided to die. No warnings, no click of death, no slow read-time, no S.M.A.R.T. reporting an error. It was just gone. This means I have to get a HDD. The good news is that I can get one at about 4x the size (from 80 GB to 320 GB) for around $70. It would be easier if I was not dealing with PATA, but my system is just that old; I love it so much.
Maybe I am turning into a computer technophile