Recently...
4 APR 2001
8PM 
Possibly the worst part of my recent hard drive debacle is the loss of my email - five years of email. I know, you're thinking that I should have been regularly backing up important data, like email. In fact, I did back up important data, from time to time. It's just that I backed up to my second hard drive. Who'd have thought that I'd lose both drives at once? A lesson learned, I guess.
What's the point of my rambling? In short, if you've contacted me recently, there's a very good chance that I've lost your email address and all correspondence from you. What can you do? Send me a new email, so that I can harvest your address. And if I haven't responded to a question that you've posed to me via email, please ask again. I know that this in inconvenient. I apologize. Thank you.
3 APR 2001
8PM
Have you ever had a hard disk fail? It's happened to me before - the klunking sound, the error messages. It's all happened before. But on Saturday, it was very different. I switched on my faithful PC and...
Stupid HD Primary Master: NONE Stupid HD Primary Slave: NONE Non-bootable disk. Have a great day.
Huh? Ok, I took some liberties with the above screen output, but still - Huh? It was as if both of my hard drives were just... gone. Is it possible that both drives simultaneously died of old age? I grabbed my calculator and performed a quick calculation: hard drive Mean Time Between Failures (divided by) my bad karma (multiplied by) the air displaced in India by a butterfly's wings (equals) Not Very Likely.
Were the drives stolen by a stealthy cat burglar? Removing a few screws, I opened the case. All cables and jumpers in place, two silver Western Digital hard drives stared up at me. I can't prove it, but I swear they laughed. And both disks were accounted for.
Could a power surge have persuaded my computer to ignore the hard disks? I guess that's possible. However, I have a feeling that such a surge would have damaged other system components. So far, everything else appears to be in working order.
As I see it, that leaves me with the most probable of improbable causes: a boot sector virus that managed to get past my anti-virus software. That would explain why the disks were invisible to the system BIOS. That would explain why there wasn't a problem until the computer was powered down and then powered back up. Most importantly, that would explain why both hard drives malfunctioned at the same time. I cannot confirm whether or not a virus attack caused Saturday's mayhem. The drives are not recognized by my BIOS, so I cannot attempt to repair the boot sector. And I'm pretty sure that I can't afford to pay for professional voodoo hard disk repair/recovery.
Three days, a BIOS upgrade, and a new hard drive later, my PC is recovering nicely. It wasn't until the wee hours of Sunday morning that the computer finally accepted an operating system. Though the computer can recognize and use the full capacity of huge hard drive partitions, it won't run MS Windows on a partition larger than 8.4 GB. Fun. It only took me about eight failed installation attempts to figure that out.
