358 - Bad-Things–tear-

Bad things happen. This time, they chose to happen to me: my hard disk doesn’t appear to be in-tune with the definition for “working” that I hold dear. Instead of the usual grindings and whirrings, now there are strange clickings and windings. Worse still is the fact that nothing seems to be able to see the device (aside from the BIOS, which happily reports that the disk is there, just unusable).

Sixty gigabytes of data are gone. A large portion of this is was my collection of mp3s. Fortunately my iPod was full of many of the downloaded albums, so most of my collection should be re-buildable at some point in the future from my CDs. As for music that isn’t on CDs or the iPod, I guess that I shall buy the CDs if I liked it that much. Good news for recording artists the world over!

Aside from the music, most important stuff is backed up in various places. I fear, however, that the ShellOn code is gone for good as I never did get round to adding it to a remote CVS tear. So it never will progress past the Release Candidate stage. The same for dWall and pretty much all my other Windows applications, past versions of my websites, collection of Anime, various exceedingly old Office documents from high school that I could never bring myself to delete and much more besides.

Most I hope that I won’t miss. At worst, I will have gained the realisation that keeping Important Things solely on such a transient and fragile media as a hard disk is probably a Bad Thing =)

At the moment I am running Ubuntu on a small eight-gig hard disk I had on a shelf. Seems to be running well. Ubuntu is a very nice piece of work, highly recommended if you want a system that Just Works. The main problem I have had so far is that DVD support is not there out-of-the-box; I had to download and compile libdvdcss to watch encrypted DVDs. Saying that, I don’t think DVD support is in any mainstream linux distro, nor Windows, so it is not a Ubuntu specific problem. I’m also missing my new Xorg eye-candy! Overall, I like the simple install and general well-working distro Ubuntu seems to be.

For now, back to wondering what to do about things…