Thomas’ hard drive on his computer (my old Beige G3) went south quite awhile ago. I thought I had successfully copied everything from it last weekend onto another drive, but I couldn’t get his computer to boot with that drive. I thought there might be something wrong with that drive so this weekend I did some more drive swapping in order to get Thomas another drive. Here’s where things stood before I started:
- One 80 Gb drive in my computer is my startup drive
- One 80 Gb drive in my computer is a data-only (non-booting) drive
- One 30 Gb drive that was “laying around” that I had tried to make Thomas’ new drive but wouldn’t boot
- One 160 Gb new, unformatted drive
It’s really easy to swap drives in and out of my computer and it can hold up to four hard drives at a time. Because of that, I have been doing all the work there. One of the drive mounts is vertical and is held securely by a single screw. Almost every time I remove that screw, it falls between the hard drive and the mounting sled. Usually, I just turn the mounting sled upside down and the screw falls out. This time I forgot to do that and it evidently shorted out the hard drive circuit board next time I powered up. It took me a while to figure out what had happened since the only symptom was that my computer wouldn’t boot. When I realized what had happened, I switched focus back to installing Thomas’ new hard drive so that I could feel somewhat successful on the day. Alas, the same problem occurs there as the previous hard drive – the computer won’t recognize the drive as a boot drive. Failure there. After all my efforts, here’s what I had left:
- One 80 Gb unbootable and probably unreadable hard drive
- One 80 Gb drive with Thomas’ stuff on it that won’t boot in his computer
- One 30 Gb drive with Thomas’ stuff on it that won’t boot in his computer
- One 160 Gb drive presumably with my carbonite offer codes on it
- Two computers that won’t boot
I suppose there’s nothing wrong with the 30Gb drive so I’ll continue to work on getting that to work for Thomas. I’ve got a week-old backup that I can restore to the second 80Gb drive, but I really don’t have a drive I can boot with now. Perhaps I’ll boot with Thomas’ 30Gb in my computer until I can restore the 80.
Sometimes I really, really hate technology.