My Reelity

The one in which Ruok tries to clone his hard disk and almost ended up ruining the original.

Haven’t been blogging as I was trying to repair a self inflicted damage to my hard disk. It all began when I decided to finally get a hard disk to back up all my video clips and a spanking new 500gb disk was my choice. I read somewhere that cloning hard disk is a cinch with the right software, and I had intended to clone my 250gb to my new 500gb, and then use the 250gb as a back up.

Then Murphy decided to strike. My first few attempts at cloning failed, and I was really frustrated as there didn’t seem to be any reason why the cloning process should fail. After a few more google searches, I deduce that the problem was that for some unfathomable reason, my hard disk’s access mode was “CHS” instead of “LBA”. And try as I may, I just couldn’t format the new disk to “LBA”.

Now, the only other mode available on my motherboard was “Large”, but as I had managed to get all my previous hard disks to “LBA” before, I was determined to set it to “LBA”, no matter what. Of course, the other reason was that “LBA” is supposed to be the better mode, and because of the fact that I have simple tastes; only the best will satisfy, I soldiered on.

I updated my BIOS, and I even tried format the hard disk from a Windows boot up CD. No go. Next I decided to try out some disk utilities from the hard disk manufacturer as well. Thats when Murphy came to visit.

The thing is, all the while before this, I had the nigging suspicion to do a proper back up before continuing further. But I guess I was too confident of fending off any visit from Murphy. And I paid a dear dear price for it.

After another unsuccessful attempt, I turned off the computer, and the next day, it refused to boot again. I think what happened was that I tried one of the cloning functions from the hard disk manufacturer’s software, but I cancelled the operation half way, having changed my mind. And because of that, it corrupted my original disk’s boot record.

Sigh.

And so begins the long and tedious process of recovery. The good news is that I’ve managed to save most of my important data. And I have also finally cloned my hard disk. I had to settle for the “Large” setting; which if I had done earlier, would have saved me the hours and agony of recovery.

Times like this, I often mused why I’m better at computers than I am with women. I got a second chance here; I rarely get that with the ladies…