RIP Davy Jone's Locker: An Obituary

So it died for good last night. After two weeks of battling with bad sectors, my external hard drive finally kicked it. I lost all of my music and videos that weren't on my MP3 player or PMP. That boils down to I was only to save about half a gig of my dance music, most of my movie score music, and only the movies that were important enough to me to have on my PMP all the time. ;_; Luckily, I had transferred all my pictures and documents to main hard drive last week when I realized this was probably going to happen. But I lost about 30 gigs of music and 80 gigs worth of video. Only about half of that music is on Omoikane (the Mac) and none of the video. At least the hard drive is under warranty, so I'll get a replacement in a few days, but I still have to rebuild from the rubble.

What happened is my cat sat on the "Next" key two weeks ago while my music player was open and we were gone, repeatedly hitting the hard drive and burned out sectors. It's actual physical defects now, and I can't even mount it at this point. I'm not sure if overheating warped it or the heads scratched it, but it's gone. At least I've had two weeks to prepare for this and come to terms with it. I'm just glad it's under warranty (yay for registering it when I pulled it out a few months ago!) I hadn't updated you guys that I was wrong about the drive to save you from more of these techy posts. lol

So with the passing of my external 120 gig hard drive, I would like to say a few words:

Davy Jones' Locker, you served me well in the past. You dutifully stored my media without complaint and even held torrents and other downloads in escrow while they transfered. You backed up my documents and through several system wipes, you were there for me, offering all I needed to get back to work. You were a good friend until that fateful day two weeks ago when I left my music player up. I had just moved you and Sophia next to the window and ran out to the store to pick up some CAT5. I was only gone a half hour, but the damage was done. One of the cats sat on the keyboard and held down the "Next" key for an untold amount of time, repeatedly skipping songs, running up to 10 songs at a time due to the crossfader settings. This either overheated you or scratched your surface, I'm not sure witch, but it was a mortal wound. A mortal wound that slowly spread until at 1 AM last night, you finally failed to mount. Over the past few weeks, you put up with repeated checkdisk scans, an attempted defragmentation, and various other forms of attempted fixes, all to no avail. May you rest in piece my friend. There will never be another drive like you. Well, except the identical replacement drive that I will name "Davy Jones' Locker" too.

NOT Cool.

I could kill the Siamese cat. We moved to computers out of the bedroom and into the ex-dining room (I say that because we've lined it with tables and desks to create a studio center for Jill's artwork). I put my laptop next to the window, 'cause, believe it or not, I like the sunlight and stuff. Anyway, I set it all up yesterday and after Scott picked up the kids, we ran to Wal-Mart for about a half an hour. I left Winamp up, but not running, and while we were gone, the damn cat sat on my keyboard; more specifically, the media keys. That not only played music, but she sat on the "next" key. This told Winamp to play a new song about every tenth of a second. Through ALL of my music. 30+ Gigs of it. With crossfading (this meant about 10 songs playing at any given time to accommodate my crossfading settings of 1 second). Now my external hard drive (where I store EVERYTHING; all my music, videos, pictures, and documents) is shot. Windows can't read it (I/O errors), but Acronis Disk Director can. Best $50 I ever spent on software; it's literally saved this laptop 4 times. I've been running a check on it since last night, and it's only 6% through the actual file clusters (it has 111 Gigs to sort through). It's found a bunch of errors and fixed them, but I won't know how bad the full damage is until it's done. That could be days from now. >_<>