Hard drive troubles
Today was a very busy stay, start to finish. In the morning hours, I was kept busy printing and binding three depositions and also editing the Safe At Home Show. This week’s show consists of footage from our recent trip to New York, with the family’s visit to Niagara Falls appearing on this one. So it’s really interesting. This was the first time I saw the video that Dad shot of the Falls, and it turned out great! They’re really beautiful.
In the afternoon, I went to run some errands — delivering depositions, mailing stuff, etc. I also got a haircut while in Belleville and visited Great-Grandma Arndt also. I brought her a small strawberry milkshake that I picked up from McDonald’s, and she was happy to have that. It was nice to get to see her for a little while before heading back home. Even though she’s 90 years old, she’s still very alert and attentive.
The evening was a weird one. First off, Mark bought a new computer this evening, so I was assisting him in setting it up. He had to roll back to Windows 98 (instead of the pre-loaded Windows XP), so I helped him find Win98 drivers for everything — USB ports, video card, network card. The only thing missng now is the driver for the sound card, but I’m confident that we can locate that one way or another.
Another thing going on is my D: drive (the 60 GB drive) has been acting up this evening. It’s having symptoms of a drive that’s dying, so I’m trying to see what, if anything, I can do to rescue it. The symptoms it’s had are basically that browsing the drive is extremely slow, and it’s almost impossible to copy or delete files/folders from the drive. It’s a good four or five years old, so I’ve had it for some time. I hope I don’t lose it, but, with the way things are looking now, I might be back to two hard drives soon. I hope this isn’t the case! Thankfully, it’s the least-used out of my three hard drives. But it still has an important role. I’m currently running a CHKDSK (Windows XP’s version of Scandisk) to see if that can fix anything. So far, I’m getting a lot of “File record segment #### is unreadable” messages, so that’s not a good sign.
Another thing I did tonight. We received a bit of snow this evening, and our Internet connection was down since some had accumulated on the satellite dish. So I brought the stepladder out to the small deck in the back, set it up, and climbed the ladder, broom in hand. I reached up to knock most of the snow off of the dish, and that seemed to do the trick. Thankfully, there wasn’t anything frozen to the dish or we might have had some trouble getting back online.
It’s really late, and I’m just now finishing updating the website for the night, so I’d better get going. I ought to get some sleep!