It’s been a rough morning. First, I was playing poker at Canterbury, and that didn’t go so well. Then, while driving home, my car’s engine temperature gauge shot into the red and the computer warned of excessive coolant temperature. While dealing with that problem, my cell phone broke and fell apart. Speaking from my recent experience, being stuck in the middle of nowhere, at 1:45am, with a fierce wind blowing heavy rain, and without a form of communications, unequivocally sucks.

As I mentioned in my previous post, my work computer’s hard drive went down for the count last Thursday. All signs were pointing to a catastrophic hardware failure, yet the drive continued to show faint hints of life. Ontrack’s software was able to pull the names of many of the files off of the drive before consistently freezing at 76% complete. Windows’ bootloader was able to launch from the hard drive and proceede until the time for mounting the boot volume (hence the error). I didn’t give up hope.

That’s not to say the IT department rep shared my faith. That guy made a cursory attempt to mount the drive using BartPE, which even a untrained monkey could have told you would not have worked in that situation. After that feeble gesture, he fed me a bunch of bull related to data loss and data recovery software before leaving. I HATE it when IT guys lie to my face. They think they’re being clever, but I’m not fooled for even a second.

Now, the guy doing the actual replacement of my hard drive was much easier to deal with. He was receptive to the idea of loaning me the old drive for a couple of days to continue my recovery efforts (it would have to be returned eventually to fulfill the warranty terms). We agreed that he would put a new drive in my computer, image the new drive, and hook my old drive up as a slave device. After performing that operation, he gave the contraption back to me.

A wonderous thing occured. When my computer booted off its new drive, Windows launched and — this is key — mounted my old drive. All my files were intact and accessible! There was no sign of the previous turmoil.

I’m not sure what caused the problem, and I’m even less certain what fixed it, but I do know that I got my data back.

Needless to say, I spared no time copying my precious data from the old drive onto the new drive and onto the network drive.

Nothing foretold the pain and agony to come. No hints, no indications. When it happened, it was out of the blue.

I was sitting in my cube this afternoon chatting with one of my coworkers about a design approach. All of a sudden, my computer restarted itself. “How odd,” I thought. The computer posted, went through the Windows bootloader, and began to start Windows. As the black WinXP splash screen was being displayed, the screen briefly flashed to blue and the computer restarted again. This time, I interrupted the boot process to tell Windows to start in safe mode.

Blue screen: UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME.

The next time, I told it to launch the recovery console.

BSOD again.

Uh-oh.

A tech from the IT department came out and did a cursory check. He spoke the words I feared most: “Your drive is fried.” D’oh!

Most of my files are stored on a network drive, but all of my source code gets checked out to my local hard drive. I had a half-dozen files checked out that hadn’t been checked in for almost a day. A day’s work, up in smoke. Arg!!

On the upside, I’m not convinced that all is lost. There is evidence that the filesystem is hosed but that the drive is still somewhat functional. I’m going to go in early tomorrow and try my bag of tricks to recover it. If I am unsuccessful, it might be an early weekend for me, as a replacement drive wouldn’t be available until Monday. Oooohhh, I hope it works…

Professional hockey is back in Minnesota! A year and a half after going to my last NHL game, tonight I attended a Wild game. Woohoo!

My seat was great: fourth row, center ice, right behind the Wild penalty box. The weather was great: I walked to the Xcel center with only a light jacket. The game was great: the Wild pounded the Sharks 6-1, with five of those goals coming in the third period. A trifecta!

On top of all that, it was inspirational to see some fantastic goaltending. Fernandez (the Wild goalie) made a bunch of beautiful saves despite the new NHL restrictions on goaltenders. The pros make it look so easy. Two weeks until my league’s season starts!

Wednesday night, I said to myself, “Self, what should I do this weekend?” Much to my surprise, I replied, “You obviously have gone far too long without taking a huge test, so you should take the GRE.”

Yup, a spontaneous GRE-taking. Is this an example of callow intellectual hubris? I hope not. Is it an attempt by yet another disillusioned young professional to right a feckless post-college life? Perhaps.

My line of reasoning goes like this: I forget more and more of my school-derived knowledge with every passing day. My writing skills have grown stale from inattention. My lexicon might expand over time, but many of the words on the GRE are so obscure that it would be only by Providence that I would encounter them in time to be useful. Really, how often do you see the word “opprobrious” in literature?* Taking all of this into consideration leaves but one conclusion: sitting for the GRE sooner is better than sitting for the GRE later.

Twelve hours until test time…

(*specially-chosen example from the GRE practice exam)