Friday, Jul. 25, 2003 - 12:13 a.m.

Gone with the Wind

The time had come. I had been talking for months about reinstalling my operating system. Last summer, my compact disc burner stopped working. In October, I did a partial reinstall, but my system was still a little wiggy, and the sound did not work, and neither did the cd burner. Blaming my motherboard's onboard audio, I bought a new sound card and intalled it, but the computer failed to recognize the driver on the cdrom that came with it. I desperately want to compose music, but can't do it until audio on my damn computer works. I figured it must be a corrupted operating system preventing audio and my compact disc burner from working.

I take backing up data very seriously. When I was living in Richmond, my hard drive started crapping out and making very loud grinding noises, and sometimes not working at all. Luckily, before it died completely, I was able to back up my data on My Very Busy Friend's computer. After that, I resolved to always have two hard drives so that I could have a backup copy of everything in case one drive failed. I would have supplemented this redundancy by also saving my data to cdrw's weekly, if my cd burner had been working.

But it's easy to put off reinstalation when you use your computer all the time. When is it convenient to put everthing aside for many hours? Plus, since I had already tried a superficial reinstall and it didn't solve my problems, I was sure I needed to do a clean reinstall, meaning I had to completely erase one of my hard drives. I put it off some more. Then my computer started freezing up all the time, even after frequent restarts. I knew I couldn't keep waiting.

I spent many hours painstakingly making sure all my files on my C drive were copied onto my D drive. I copied my bookmarks from both Internet Explorer and Opera. I even found my email from Outlook Express (in case you don't know, Microsoft hides your mail from you at C:WINDOWSApplication DataIdentities{F29457C98-1588-longstringofgobbledygook-AF51-A011D046}/Outlook Express). I scanned my D drive for viruses. I was ready.

It appears that in the process of reinstalling my operating system, I inadvertently erased all my files.

How did it happen? I don't know. To do a clean reinstall, I ran Fdisk to delete the partitions on my C drive, create a new active partition, and then I told it to "format C:". At no time did I do anything to my D drive, to the best of my knowledge. Does it go ahead and format D when you only tell it to format C?

Was it really my fault, or somehow did Kucinich have his revenge on me?

Some dissidents have government thugs break into their homes to confiscate their computer files. I achieve the same end, saving them the trouble, by erasing my own files.

In 20/20 hindsight, I realized I could have just opened my box and unplugged drive D before repartioning, etc. Then nothing could have harmed the precious data. But that would have meant moving my monitor, and unplugging some other wires, and there was all kinds of mess on my desk, so I couldn't be bothered. It would have added no more than 5 minutes to my reinstallation process. But I was so sure that if I never targeted any changes at drive D, it would remain unchanged.

I'm still hoping in vain that somehow my files are all still intact on my D drive, and that for some reason, my newly installed operating system can't see them.

So now I'm taking a grim inventory of my life. Here's a list of all I've lost:

1. All the email I sent and received over the past 3 years.

2. All my audio, including a stupendous collection of speeches from prominent leftists like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Michael Parenti.

3. Chat logs

4. Web bookmarks

5. What little I had written to date of my forthcoming book, Funsmart 1.0

6. Lyrics to a dandy new song I wrote about vasectomies. How much of it did I commit to memory?

7. Everything else I've written or created in the past 3 years

8. photos

9. All my software. This is what hurts the most in the short term. It's not like I paid for any of it, but it will take me forever to download over my 36kbps dialup. It took me hours just to download the driver for my video card so I could stop looking at everything in 640x480 in 16 colors. Until I get the software, I can't do the tasks I'm accustomed to doing frequently.

10. Probably a lot more precious, irreplaceable stuff I haven't remembered yet.

What I haven't lost:

1. My computer's hardware.

2. My websites (stuff stored on servers elsewhere, such as this diary)

3. Stuff from my years at Twin Oaks Community, which I still have on cdrom.

4. The little I managed to burn onto cdrom before my burner stopped working last summer.

5. My sanity. Still more or less there (as much as I ever had.)

6. And I still have my life, and my health, and my house. The weather is sunny, cool, and heavenly. I have Anarchy Man around.

Even worse, my audio still would not work. I put in the cdrom for the driver, ran the installer, and nothing. I ran the "add new hardware thing, and the computer still failed to find any suitable driver on that cdrom. I was down. I was starting to contemplate whether my hardware was busted, and I needed a whole new computer.

As Tyler Durden said, "once you lose everything, you're free to do anything." With my Windows files gone, and my Windows software gone, there's even less keeping me from switching to Linux. That's something I meant to do years ago, but kept failing at due to my ornery Windows operating system. Ideally I want to do most of my stuff in Linux, but have a dual boot computer so I can still use certain applications which are only available in Windows.

Windows is wack. Like even now that I have a clean install, it still crashed to a blue screen when I all I was running was Windows Update and notepad.

I basically know just enough about computers to get myself in big trouble.

Last night, I tried unplugging and replugging my D drive in hopes it would help my computer to rediscover my lost files. While I had my box open, I noticed that the jumper which control whether my motherboard's onboard audio is enabled or not were only bridging 3 out of the 4 sets of pins it was supposed to. This error must date back to my motherboard's assembly in the factory. I put the jumper back on right and took out my sound card. My audio still did not work. I repositioned the jumper so that it would disable the onboard audio. I put my sound card back in on a lark. Lo and behold, my computer automatically started installing the driver for my sound card. So now after nearly a year, I have computer audio again. "Beautiful Way" by Beck never sounded so beautiful.

newest archive guestbook email rings profile Diaryland