Trip Statistics / Back to the Drawing Board
Here is the ultimate list of statistics gathered and collected during my trip-
In other news, I'm back to the drawing board with my hard drive. As I mentioned in my last post, I was being the usual technophile that I am by taking apart a dead hard drive and trying to make it work again by transplanting it's guts into a duplicate, working drive. Well, it didn't work because it turns out I didn't get the exact same duplicate drive. The drive I ordered off eBay was the same model but the circuit board attached to its belly was a newer edition even though everything looked the exact same. I didn't know that until it was too late, though. I read somewhere that, before taking the drives apart to do a platter transplant, to exchange circuit boards and see if that solves the problem. I did, fired it up, and to my horror, white smoke immediately rose from the board.
I had vaporized several on-baord chips. The new board was shot. It was only then that I realized that, printed off in a small corner of the board, the edition number was different than that of my older board. Since the new board was fried, I couldn't use the new drive's shell to transplant the data platters into so I had to continue working with the old drive and its shell. All that was salvageable out of the new drive was it's read-heads and motors. I transplanted those, and although the drive sounds quieter when on, it still gives me the click of death. So $35 down the tubes, but I'm not giving up. I'm looking for another drive on eBay and this time, I'm even more anal about getting the exact drive. Also with the new drive I broke, I can use it as a practice drive to figure out exactly how to transplant platters. So, not the end of the world and I know even more about hard drives.
Garhan, are you listening? I'm sure you're enjoying a post like this. My current theory is that either the circuit board went bad on the old drive or the platters themselves with the data on it somehow got corrupted and is no longer readable even though the rest of the thing is working. I may have to give up soon...
- Total Distance Traveled: 8,884.7 Miles
- Length of Trip: 54 Days
- States Visited: 30
- State Capitals Visited: 11
- Number of Photos Taken: 1,422
- Number of Movies Filmed: 155
- Combined Length of Movies: 64.55 Minutes
- Total File Size of All Recorded Media: 3.1 GB
- Worst Paid Gas Price: $3.02 @ West Yellowstone, Montana
- Best Gas Price: $2.25 @ Rayville, LA & Mesquite, TX
- Overall Miles Per Gallon: 42.70 Miles
- Overall Cost of Each Mile: $0.061
- Cost of Trip in Fuel: $527.62 or 208.051 Gallons of Unleaded at an Overall Average Price of $2.593/gallon
- Distance from Home At Furthest Point (Cape Canaveral, FL): 2,584 Miles
In other news, I'm back to the drawing board with my hard drive. As I mentioned in my last post, I was being the usual technophile that I am by taking apart a dead hard drive and trying to make it work again by transplanting it's guts into a duplicate, working drive. Well, it didn't work because it turns out I didn't get the exact same duplicate drive. The drive I ordered off eBay was the same model but the circuit board attached to its belly was a newer edition even though everything looked the exact same. I didn't know that until it was too late, though. I read somewhere that, before taking the drives apart to do a platter transplant, to exchange circuit boards and see if that solves the problem. I did, fired it up, and to my horror, white smoke immediately rose from the board.
I had vaporized several on-baord chips. The new board was shot. It was only then that I realized that, printed off in a small corner of the board, the edition number was different than that of my older board. Since the new board was fried, I couldn't use the new drive's shell to transplant the data platters into so I had to continue working with the old drive and its shell. All that was salvageable out of the new drive was it's read-heads and motors. I transplanted those, and although the drive sounds quieter when on, it still gives me the click of death. So $35 down the tubes, but I'm not giving up. I'm looking for another drive on eBay and this time, I'm even more anal about getting the exact drive. Also with the new drive I broke, I can use it as a practice drive to figure out exactly how to transplant platters. So, not the end of the world and I know even more about hard drives.
Garhan, are you listening? I'm sure you're enjoying a post like this. My current theory is that either the circuit board went bad on the old drive or the platters themselves with the data on it somehow got corrupted and is no longer readable even though the rest of the thing is working. I may have to give up soon...