Catching files in a bucket

[drcpunk]

Okay, we may have it under control. As of last week, the laptop wasn't even able to get online with a cable. Last night, mnemex persuaded it to work with the cable, even though the cable is itself flakey. We set up file sharing to his laptop, and, since I don't actually have enough space on my hard drive left to zip up the stuff I hadn't been able to back up before, we copied it unzipped, to the cute external hard drive he bought, via his laptop.

So, next I boot up my Eee and see if I can confirm that this worked, maybe copy to sd cards for extra paranoia. Then, I hunt down the recover cd for this computer. I noted that I wasn't sure the computer would work with it, but mnemex says that it will.

Comments

[jl8e]

Why wouldn't you expect the recover cd to work?

Of course, given the rapid progressive deterioration, and the inconsistency in what's working, I'm thinking it is a hardware failure.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Basically, because stuff stops working on the laptop, and I don't understand why, and computers are magical things to me. Well, okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I used to say that, in the terms of R. Talisorian's Cyberpunk RPG, I had a Tech score of 2, which means, "Light bulbs are magical."

And, if it is a hardware failure, I don't know if the cd / dvd drive will work at all.

I'd hoped to do an extra backup, from the hard drive onto the sd cards, but my Eee and the hard drive don't seem to get along that well, likely because the hard drive is formatted for Windows. That is, I can see the files in File Manager, but when I tried to copy the music files to the 16 gb card, File Manager crashed.

[jl8e]

Were the files accessible on Josh's machine?

And "computers are magic" is about half-way to understanding them. The actual truth is "computers are possessed by spirits." (Not necessarily evil spirits -- that depends on which OS you're using.)

[mneme]

*snort* Spirits that will do everything you (or someone else) has told them, but not necessarily what you want?

I suppose if one views electricity as a spiritual medium, that's even true.

I'm actually thinking that the progressive issue is mostly software, but may be created/maintained by a hardware problem -- particularly since Wierd Things have happened to Lisa's box over the last few (like being sent back to the mother ship twice).

edit: Yes, they were accessable on my machine. I think.

I didn't want to stress my flash or write into a 60 gig drive with not all that much space free, so I just netcopied things directly to the usb hard drive, and didn't actually check them after I did so (I should have -- but then, that's why I wanted Lisa to zip the files to begin with -- consistency checking is my friend. Alas, she didn't have the space...)