Posted 5:10 PM by Floyd

A Hand Appears on the Ledge

It's been hell but I am getting back to normal with my computer. Saturday I spent a few hours with Bo the Tech installing a new hard drive. We attached the new drive and were ready to install Windows 2K. Bo put the first installation disk in the floppy drive.

I/O Error

Fortunately I am the master of every situation. When I bought my current computer in '99 I kept my old computer around, and it was under the house in a big plastic bag. I went under the house and lugged it up. We unscrewed the cover, removed the floppy drive, and attached it to my current computer.

I/O Error

I started to wonder if I would have to throw my computer off a cliff. I called my neighbors to see if they would let me borrow a floppy. No one was home which was just as well; can you imagine their reaction? "Hi, it's Floyd. I was wondering if I could dismantle your computer?"

My wife, who is a saint when I am stressed out, left for Fry's to get a floppy. Bo loaded Windows XP and started a scandisk of the old drive. Sherry returned in record time. Scandisk did not help, but later I was able to use the chkdsk tool. chkdsk found some files on the old hard drive and put them in some directories named DIR00xxx, where xxx is a number from 001 to 667.

Sunday I took a break from all this to play in a Swiss Teams in Marin. It was my second opportunity to play on an expert team. We played well in general, with a 5-1-1 record, and beat every good team we played against, including Ron Smith's team. But we never beat anyone by a lot and finished with 81 VPs on a 140 average, which was good for only fourth out of eight in our bracket. Third place was just one VP ahead of us. I played fairly well but made a few mistakes, including one hand where I went for 800.

Monday I slogged through all the DIR directories and saved the data. Most of the stuff that I had not been working with was okay; some of the data I had dealt with last Wednesday was corrupt. Then I started installing programs. There's a lot of work to do yet but now I have office, Eudora, Palm, etc. (In many cases I got more up-to-date versions of my software. I must say that the new Palm desktop had the most butt-ugly color scheme I had ever seen.)

Later tonight there will be more blogging. I plan to comment on Eric Raymond's latest post. I may even do some bridge-blogging. But for now I am trying to deal with level 3 difficulty on Civilization III.