Saved and Restored

The Tuesday morning ride seemed harder than usual.  Harder, in fact, than it actually was.  It was just one of those days when I felt dragged-out right from the start. Tim and Woody attacked as usual.  I went with it, but got dropped by a subsequent attack and ended up in no-man's-land until Howard showed up.  I started to recover a bit and took a nice long pull that started to close the gap.  When I pulled off, Howard attacked.  Seriously?  I got back home 40 some-odd miles later and seriously considered calling in sick.  I suppose I may have been fighting off some kind of bug, or was just suffering the consequences of too little sleep.  Whatever the reason, on a scale of one to ten, I never felt better than a five all day.  There were other complications, too.  The night before, rather late, my laptop's hard drive started to fail.  I got a couple of messages informing me of such and strongly recommending immediate backup.  I took them seriously and first did a full backup, which took literally hours, filled up about four DVDs, and ended with a message, in RED, telling me that the backup had failed.  Huh?  So, reading the writing on the wall, I ran out around lunchtime and bought an external hard drive, stopped by the house where the laptop was thankfully still running, and imaged the entire hard drive onto the external drive. That evening when I turned on the computer, it wouldn't boot.  Since I had to depart early Wednesday for a plane ride up to Iowa City for The Daughter's graduation, all I could do was pack it up with the external drive and deal with it up in Iowa, which coincidentally is where I'd bought the computer a bit over a year ago.

After arriving up here in Hawkeye country, I went over to the big Coralville mall and picked up a 500 gig hard drive for $75.  I remember paying nearly that once for a box of ten 90k floppies back in the 80s.  I swapped the new drive for the old one, popped in my recovery CD, and crossed my fingers.  It started to load and then hung, eventually showing an error message about a faulty device.  Hmmmm.  A couple more tries produced the same result.  I removed the CD and took a look at it.  There were a couple of big fingerprints on the shiny side, so I wiped them off and tried once more.  That did the trick and it loaded, bringing up the recovery screen.  Of course, it still couldn't see the external drive because it didn't have the necessary drivers, so I had to find and install those, and then all looked good.  I had it restore the internal hard drive from the disc image on the external drive, went downstairs to eat, and when I got back everything was back exactly the way it had been before the crash, as if nothing had ever happened.  That was a bit of a relief!