A Computer that broke down… Again.

Organisation, Procrastination, and Illumination.

And learning to leave well enough alone.

It begins with a blog entry I was reading about workspace organisation and productivity. The writer talked about how they organise their workspace in order to avoid cleaning it to get out of work. I have a neat workspace, but I rarely use it anymore. Not since I bought my laptop.

Since buying my laptop, I’ve spent most of the time with it sitting on my couch in front of the television and avoiding work by clicking through my favourite sites and reading others blogs (and so on…), Ignoring my workplace for various reasons - The latest being that since I updated it to Vista it’s been having problems with the dual monitor display, Often the second display was fuzzy and unreadable. Obviously a second display isn’t necessary, but how many excuses stand up to argument?

Well?

So, after finally getting around to checking all the cables and plugs and what-nots, I realise it’s Vista and it’s lack of proper support for my card that is the problem. It came down to a choice between buying a new video card or downgrading my computer. Buying a new video card costs money, so guess which choice I went for?

So, I’m installing XP back onto my computer. Everything it going fine until it comes to installing all of my programs and drivers and everything else. All of these things were kept on my 400gb external hard drive/media player. This cool little box I could use as a second hard drive or plug it into my tv to play all my media files, at least I could until about six months ago when the Tv part of the box broke down.

And then, finally, when I needed it, the rest of it broke down. I could not access my drive no matter what I tried.

Ever since the tv part broke down, I had considered installing it into my computer as a second hard drive but… well, I didn’t get around to it. And now seemed like the appropriate time.

So, that’s what I did. I installed it into my computer, the drive came up on the bios, it came up in the hardware list in the control panel. Everything was going smoothly but the drive didn’t appear on ‘My Computer’. I figured it may’ve had it’s own formatting that only the media player recognised and I would need to put a new partition on there to access it.

I downloaded Partition Magic, because I’d had success of making new partitions without any data loss with the program in the past.

The same could not be said this time.

I lost Two Hundred and Seventy Gigabytes of backups, photos and downloads. 270gb!!!

The downloads, I don’t mind so much in losing. Although it was A LOT. I can always download it again if need be. It was mostly just movies and tv shows I liked. Including a complete collection of The Outer Limits episodes, The Young Ones, Black Books, The Mighty Boosh, Doctor Who and old cartoons like Dungeons and Dragons, The Tick and Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

The worst part was all my photos and backups. Most of the photos I don’t have anywhere else, and in the backups (amongst stuff I have on my main drive) was all my old short story attempts and other writing notes. Some of it I have on paper, but there is a lot of stuff I’ve lost there.

Over the last few days I’ve been trying with various programs to save as much as I can but a majority of the files are corrupted and unsalvageable.

I’m now almost ready to give up. I’m on my last attempt now and so far I’ve saved a little, but this has been a major loss.

But I’ve had worse things happen.

Soon I’ll clean up everything and get my workspace neat and tidy again. Then we’ll see who’s the productive one.

ME!