Call back Tomorrow

I can't believe it's been so long since my last post over here. I did have a holiday after all. Yes, even my work gives out some days off. And the days surrounding the holiday? Special "holiday" schedules: everybody comes in at 6:30am at the latest and stays until 3:30 at the latest. At least I did get to go home early for a change. It was a bit of shock having to wake up so early but some how I survived.

Thanks Giving, yesterday more specifically, I went down to see some relatives. Actually I drove down to see my sister on Wednesday night. I left work and drove all the way up to where I live (an hour drive) got some things together and then drove all the way down to my sister's place, 90+ minutes drive. I did this because the computer I just got through paying off ($300) as my sister's wedding gift had something wrong with the HDD and none of my fantabulous over-the-phone solutions seemed to be getting any where. So I packed up my slip-streamed copy of Windows 2000 upgrade and NT 4 (it's an upgrade after all) along with Bart's PE and headed down there.

Now you see my sister and her new husband wanted to take their computer with them on their wedding day because they thought they needed a computer. But I convinced them to let me have it a bit longer so I could make some backups, i.e. ghost disks, of the setup so they easily recover if they had some kind of HDD crash.

So what happens? Their HDD crashed. There's my $300 for me. I go through all kinds of gymnastics to get the damn thing back up. Finally it's more than obvious the HDD is simply gone. Unless I could have really formatted it at a "low level". They may have reset enough of it maybe it could be used. Even that's doubtful. So I did attempt the stupid ghost disks I made SPECIFICALLY for this purpose and what happens? The damn things didn't work. Ok had I brought a long a bootable DOS CD or the non-infamous "Live Win98 CD" I made when I was unemployed (see my blog archives) maybe I could have patched together so kind of a restore ghost image thing. Although he HDD seemed to be giving off enough errors I don't think it would have gone through. I could have used on the HDD I ended up using for her: the one from her old computer, a Packard bell she still had stored in the closet.

But I didn't have a DOS CD or any other way to use those stupid Ghost CDs I made just so I could avoid spending entirely too long re-installing Windows 2000 and applying al the updates. But guess what: I spent a large portion of time re-installing Windows 2000 and applying all the stupid updates. And I couldn't even make anew ghost CD. All around I really dropped the ball with the whole I.T. guy thing. My sister's computer is now running though. Albeit with firewall software setup she really doesn't know how to use but really needs with that direct cable connection.

I guess I'm done ranting for now. I need to get to bed.

  ¶ 9:34 PM