The Capable Man

It's been about a month without my computer, but I finally got it fixed, and I could only be happier if it all worked.

That it works at all, of course, is a testament to my abilities.

For several months I'd been having some disk drive problems and errors, the type of things that remind one of the acknowledged three states of hard drives:

* Hard drives that have failed.
* Hard drives that will fail.
* Hard drives that were retired in the course of a computer upgrade before failure.

After a few months of intermittant problems (mostly freezes), I started getting an ominous notice of impending doom during the Power On POST Self-Test (hee). This was remarkable, if only because I hadn't realized my computer could do that, could tell me such things, but there it was in black and white even before the computer booted.

That got my attention and sent me off to do non-computer things. I'd occasionally check, and the message would appear each time I turned the computer on (Backup now! Failure is imminent!), so I was reluctant to do anything with my machine. When I'd determined that the problem wouldn't just wander away, I went online and bought another drive.

Then I was away, and that's when the drive arrived. When I got back home, the error message stopped appearing (naturally), but I didn't trust my computer one bit. I was prepared to swap out the drive that runs Windows(tm), but a careful examination of the error message told me that it was the other drive, the one with Linux and FreeBSD, that was failing, so I needed to get smart, quick, and learn how to clone that drive.

Instead of doing that, which would be simple and brainless, I installed a later version of FreeBSD on the new drive and just cloned the linux stuff. To my amazement, it worked.

Kind of.

For the time being I'm having to boot from a floppy (need to write the MBR with the booting program) and can't print, but that ain't bad all things considered. I have a ton and a half of e-mail to go through, thousands of websites to visit, and new porn to collect.

I'll be busy catching up, but the good news is I have several entries for Crenellated Flotsam to write. It's good to be back. I've missed this.