Hardware: ugh

Today was one of those very frustrating days dealing with hardware. I hate dealing with hardware.
Radinfo’s been without a backup solution for the last few months now ever since the DLT drive I was using went belly up. I was planning to use an LTO drive I scavenged to do the tape-to-tape transfer project on the new machine. For some reason it wasn’t cooperating though and just sat there flashing it’s LEDs at me. Futzed around with it for a couple of hours getting nowhere before I decided to call it a day.

Then the home computer decides to crash on me and on reboot, finds no drives on the on-board IDE. Fantastic. Heard one of the drives making a whir-clicking sound during boot-up. When I cracked the case open, I discovered it was the ancient 3GB drive that was causing the problem and making those funny noises. Good thing I was only using as a swap drive. Fortunately when I took it out of the chain, everything booted up nicely again. whew.
Did I mention I hate dealing with hardware?
On a much better note, the 120GB drive I put in the wife’s laptop is working away nicely. Managed to get most everything restored off the old drive (which somehow magically started working again). Now it’s just the laborious task of getting Windoze all up to date and reinstalling software. I think I’ve got it back to a mostly operational state with just a few more things to reinstall.
Since that other hard drive decided to start working again, I figured I’d hit Newegg.com and pick up an enclosure for it so it could be used as an external drive. No point in having a potentially good drive sitting around doing nothing after all.
Speaking of Newegg, I’m a total convert now. A great selection to drool over and fantastic prices to boot.