I’ve been — as they say — off the grid for a while trying to configure a computer. Since my old one died I’ve been working on what to do with the new one. I did not feel like having drive bays fabricated for the new system and I certainly did not want to entertain the thought of doing a lot of hardware work either. Instead, I took a trip to Frys and geeked out for a day in search of new or old technology that will do the trick going forward.

In my geeking out I discovered I could buy an enclosure for my old PATA drives and connect them to the new system using a USB port. I chose a IDE/PATA/SATA enclosure that will work with my new system and any other computer I decide to attach it to. The beauty of enclosures is I can take any hard drive, load it into the enclosure, flip the switch to either SATA or USB and voila, I have a new portable hard drive. I like it and might I add it worked beautifully.

Unfortunately, what did not work well was my old cantankerous hard drive. It simply did not want to cooperate with me. Finally, after 20 friggin hours spent repairing bad sectors, I finally had the drive beaten to a place of submission where I could retrieve files.

I would not have cared about this drive had it not been for me doing something incredibly stupid. I saved all of my iTunes and other mp3 music files on a partition of what used to be the main or system disk on my old computer. Typically, I do not use the OS drive for storage because It’s too risky. These drives are usually the first to fail. How I managed to copy my music files to a partition on that drive escapes me. As it turns out — as in bought experience — I ended up spending another 16 hours zipping every directory until all of my music files were off that disk. I am still kicking myself for doing something that stupid but, be that as it may, it is done and I can finally have my disk burning party.

This was quite an ordeal as the old computer had been jury rigged to do all sorts of things. It was my main computer and I was quite fond of the thing. Now, I have to teach the new one some old tricks and that has been more than enough fun for one person to have. Fortunately, the more tedious and time consuming tasks are done and what remains is setting up RAID drives — my choice for redundancy — and I think I will utilize more HDD enclosures instead of installing drives inside the computer. No more fabrication and no more cooling fans to cool a crap load of drives. I just can’t see myself twisting screws and becoming a contortionist so that I can remove one or more drives from a drive bay. I can’t do it, I just can’t do it.

In summary, my Macs had a Mac Attack after the last system update and just prior to my installing Snow Leopard.  What little hair was left on my head was pulled out after this incredibly horrifying ordeal.  All I had was that miserable looking Apple and spinning gears.  The system would not boot.  Finally, after trying everything from fsck, -fy — and I had other options for the fsck part of that expression — I conceded defeat and rebooted the systems using the “C” command after startup and reinstalled Leopard.  I chose to save my settings thankfully and both systems were back in the saddle again, thank God.  I had no idea my main PC would follow suit by burning itself out and taking a drive with it.  Although, I have since learned Seagate has issued a warning that some of their drives may need a firmware update lest you find yourself screaming bloody murder.

Now, I’m back on the grid — for now. I will say Frys was a treat because it is now the only electronics store in the area where I can still buy bulk CAT 5 and Coax cable along with an assortment of other electronic goodies typically hard to find unless you order them online. As much as I love to hate that store, it’s still the best.