Doing the impossible...
Nov. 24th, 2003 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deathpixieI've always said one of the wonderful things about Macs is that they're practically impossible to crash. Unlike the PC users on my flist, I've seldom had that horrible, heart-stopping sensation of realising the hard drive has crashed into a screaming heap and there's a good possibility that everything that was on there has disappeared into the void.
Until now.
Saturday the laptop worked fine. Sunday I went to log onto the Net and have a look at the [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] RPG as was suggested by an evil Canadian man. The first sign of something being Not Quite Right was the alias I use on my desktop for Netscape not working.
No worries, I thought, and simply reset it.
Then Netscape unexpectedly quit, requiring me to restart. I tried again. iTunes then decided to follow suit and unexpectedly quit, requiring another restart. By this stage I'd decided that something wasn't right with Brittney the Laptop, so I ran Disk First Aid. Which promptly crashed the computer so badly that it can't find the hard drive at all when I turn it on. So it's off to the Mac shop with me and the laptop today, in the hopes they can retrieve the contents of my hard drive. The true irony was I was supposed to have backed up stuff soonish in preparation for switching from OS 9.2 to OSX. Silly, silly me.
Writing-wise, the damage isn't as bad as it could be. [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] has a copy of the latest Collective Mutants story, awaiting a beta. Anything that was completed is archived somewhere. I may have lost my few bits of original fiction, including the story I was tidying up for [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com]'s publishing venture, which bites. And the story about the man meeting God in the pub, which [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] will be unhappy to hear. There's a few unfinished fics that don't exist anywhere else, including several Subreality pieces started before the Great Exodus - the co-writes with [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] and [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] could possibly be the most painful loss there. That and any email sent to me in the last three months - I knew I shouldn't have let it pile up that much.
Fortunately I don't tend to keep addresses etc on the computer without backing them up on paper, and I didn't really have many images that I was horribly attached to. I don't do computer games, so again, no biggie there. Some music might have also disappeared.
At this stage I'm not really distressed - after all, I have yet to go to the computer place and find out the true extent of the situation. But even if everything is lost, it's more of an annoyance that anything. Most of the stories can be recostructed from my written notes, and the one that would really be an issue, the Collective Mutants, is safely with someone else. What really worries me is how much money this is potentially going to cost me, especially this close in to Auscon, Christmas, New Year in Toronto and then moving house in January. Money was already going to be tight, and if this costs me more than a couple of hundred, I'm screwed.
Other than that, I had a good weekend. :)
Until now.
Saturday the laptop worked fine. Sunday I went to log onto the Net and have a look at the [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] RPG as was suggested by an evil Canadian man. The first sign of something being Not Quite Right was the alias I use on my desktop for Netscape not working.
No worries, I thought, and simply reset it.
Then Netscape unexpectedly quit, requiring me to restart. I tried again. iTunes then decided to follow suit and unexpectedly quit, requiring another restart. By this stage I'd decided that something wasn't right with Brittney the Laptop, so I ran Disk First Aid. Which promptly crashed the computer so badly that it can't find the hard drive at all when I turn it on. So it's off to the Mac shop with me and the laptop today, in the hopes they can retrieve the contents of my hard drive. The true irony was I was supposed to have backed up stuff soonish in preparation for switching from OS 9.2 to OSX. Silly, silly me.
Writing-wise, the damage isn't as bad as it could be. [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] has a copy of the latest Collective Mutants story, awaiting a beta. Anything that was completed is archived somewhere. I may have lost my few bits of original fiction, including the story I was tidying up for [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com]'s publishing venture, which bites. And the story about the man meeting God in the pub, which [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] will be unhappy to hear. There's a few unfinished fics that don't exist anywhere else, including several Subreality pieces started before the Great Exodus - the co-writes with [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] and [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] could possibly be the most painful loss there. That and any email sent to me in the last three months - I knew I shouldn't have let it pile up that much.
Fortunately I don't tend to keep addresses etc on the computer without backing them up on paper, and I didn't really have many images that I was horribly attached to. I don't do computer games, so again, no biggie there. Some music might have also disappeared.
At this stage I'm not really distressed - after all, I have yet to go to the computer place and find out the true extent of the situation. But even if everything is lost, it's more of an annoyance that anything. Most of the stories can be recostructed from my written notes, and the one that would really be an issue, the Collective Mutants, is safely with someone else. What really worries me is how much money this is potentially going to cost me, especially this close in to Auscon, Christmas, New Year in Toronto and then moving house in January. Money was already going to be tight, and if this costs me more than a couple of hundred, I'm screwed.
Other than that, I had a good weekend. :)
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no subject
Date: 2003-11-23 03:53 pm (UTC)Bad Macbook. Give it BACK! (;
Here's me hoping it's okay.
Shai!
no subject
Date: 2003-11-24 06:17 am (UTC)Of course, I don't know if this is possible with a Mac, much less a laptop. You know, you could always switch to the PC crowd...
no subject
Date: 2003-11-24 02:44 pm (UTC)Besides, PCs are far more prone to this sort of thing than Macs - it's the first time in fifteen years of computer ownership this has ever happened, and how many of you PC owners can say that? ;)
I'll think of something. Even if it means taking on some cash-in-hand waitressing work next year.