Bad Sectors

I was more than concerned when I woke up bright and early this morning to find that my browser, Firefox^[#], would not start. Very often, when diagnosing computer problems, it’s important to make note of “expected behavior” versus “actual behavior” — for example, it’s not very useful to say “Oh, the internet doesn’t work.” On the other hand saying “I try to go to hotmail and, instead of bringing up the page [expected behavior] I get an error saying ‘…’ [actual behavior].”

The expected behavior this morning was: click the firefox shortcut… and see a browser window. Actual behavior was… click the firefox shortcut… and get nothing. Nothing happened. In order to observe ANYTHING happening, I had to open the task manager and click the icon over and over again, in rapid succession… and even then all I got was the occasion firefox.exe showing up in the task manager.

This was perplexing… so I walked through all of the steps suggested on the firefox site. When I uninstalled firefox, however, I ran into a problem… some directories couldn’t be deleted.

Usually this is because they’re being used. For whatever reason, Windows doesn’t like it when things that it is using cease to exist.

Unfortunately the ACTUAL problem was that my second harddrive, an 80GB Maxtor, had acquired bad sectors. I’m not sure if it’s been hanging with the wrong crowd, if it’s been RAIDed — without protection — with a drive of ill repute, or… who knows… maybe it was born that way. Regardless, this is a very bad thing. That drive contains roughly 20 GB worth of data… none of which I really care to part with.

So, abandoning all plans for the morning which included doing my homework and going to class I decided to just take care of this problem right now, before anything else gets messed up. I backed up what I could to my primary drive and then headed to circuit city. Picked up a new 40GB Western Digital (same brand as my primary drive, which as has been working flawlessly for years) and then headed back.

The new drive came with a nifty piece of software that does drive-to-drive copying… I set it to work while I ate left-over chinese and played a game of NCAA 2005… when it was done attempting to copy the 120,000 files… it reported that it couldn’t copy 52 of them.

The ones it couldn’t copy were also not terribly important… so that’s a definite plus. It’s a shame that this caused me to miss MORE class, but sometimes things just have to be dealt with.

This is also why I’ve not been online all day, which some of you have already inquired about. Tonight petey’s got Ultimate Frisbee, trying to figure out what I’m going to be for a Halloween party tomorrow night, and relaxing.