simont | (no subject)

Grrr. So, no luck on the ‘finish doing stuff with MP3s and hence stop talking about it’ front then.

The new hard disk on which I stored all the MP3s I've just spent a week collecting has failed. Catastrophically. I'm going to take it back to World of Computers at lunchtime and they'll try to copy off as much of the data as they can save for me, but frankly I don't hold out much hope of avoiding another week of shuffling CDs in and out of the machine all over again.

Words cannot describe how appalled and angry and frustrated I'm feeling right now. It doesn't help that I found out there was a problem at about midnight last night when I got home from playing board games at the Gallery, so I slept rather badly due to worrying about it, which probably isn't improving my mood; but mostly I'm just speechless at the sheer bad timing of the wretched piece of hardware, holding on for just long enough that I thought I'd finished the hard work and then blowing it all up in one go. If it were going to fail immediately, I'd have preferred if it had failed immediately.

There aren't many things that make me as upset as a large amount of effort getting wasted, whether it's my effort or someone else's. It's odd, that; I'm sure there are lots of things that are worse in absolute terms. But completely wasting a load of effort is one of the few kinds of disaster that can reliably bring me close to tears.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

If it makes you feel any better, the last time I tried to rip my entire CD collection, I not only succeeded in doing it partially, and screwing up the encoding of half of them, but left my entire CD collection in such an unmanageably horrible state that I'm going to have to repeat the entire exercise just to get them back on the shelves, let alone back in any cases at all, let alone the _right_ cases. Sigh.

I have a bet with myself that I will never get around to burning a single MP3 CD to put in my MP3-capable stereo.

It always baffles me why people expect it to make me feel better to hear that other people are having a bad time as well! Sympathy :-/

It gives them an excuse to vent, mostly, I think :-). Also I suppose it points to the problem being that of the technology rather than the person using it. Likewise ...

I was already fairly convinced the problem here was with the technology; the disk is spontaneously acquiring more and more bad sectors even as I watch, fsck refuses to even run now because there's a bum sector in the middle of the block bitmap (which is one of the few bits that can't be worked around by marking it as unusable in the badblocks inode) but it had previously worked fine, and so on. The only thing I can really imagine that I could have done but didn't was to run the Maxtor downloadable diagnostic over the disk before putting any data on it, and I'm now fairly convinced that it would have worked fine at the time if I'd done so.

... indeed, you seem to be right: I'm venting. Odd that. :-S

If it makes you feel any better, I managed to rip my whole CD collection onto the hard drive of one of my computers, and then copied it across to the other computer I have on my home network. About a month later the first hard disk failed, but fortunately I had a backup.

Hmm, I imagine that doesn't work either. I'm sorry you lost all your mp3 ripping work. Still, it does look like a good excuse to buy a DVD writer for backup purposes...

We'll just point and laugh at you instead, then.

Hugs.

'Tis always something that bugs me disproportionately as well; so I can sympathise both with yourself and with these poor bastards:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=10299

And I really must get a DVD-R so I can back up all my own MP3s :/

That is exceptionally crappy luck. I suppose the only good thing about it is that the data can be recreated... my only disk failure took out my email archives a few years ago, of which I kept no backups.

Perhaps now is the time to buy one of those programmable robot arms and teach it how to insert the CDs for you? ;)

Yes, thankfully I did at least manage to salvage all the hard-to-replace bits. (One track I had to get the artist to send me an MP3 of, another album I had to borrow a friend's copy to rip the last two tracks of, and a third I had to rip in another friend's CD drive because mine didn't like it.)

World of Computers say they'll try using Ghost to copy the data off, and apparently they've seen it work miracles before on disks that ought to have been all-over bad sectors, so there might be a chance. We'll see...

You lost your un-backed-up email archives? I've no sympathy. "Doctor, it hurts when I do this!"

Yes, I'm quite aware of the stupidity factor involved. This was half a dozen years ago, and I did only need the one lesson in harsh reality :)

You should have backed it up to CD.

Erm...

*hugs*