obfuscational hazard

What an awesome play on words to start off the new year, Monkey Keys! It has been nearly forever, and I have no one to blame but myself. You have my solemn promise, though, that I shall always update eventually, because I love you. Like all emotionally abusive relationships where you keep crawling back for more, I will continue to give you just enough assurance where you’ll stay with me instead of going to the twice as attractive, better listening blog about floral arrangements. Eat THAT FloralCraftResource.com.

“That was beautiful, Dylan.” Thanks, Fatty Key. You should go on a diet.

“I… ok…” So, where was I? For those Keys who aren’t aware, in reality I am a computer guy. I know, I don’t get it either. I spend all my working hours trying to get stupid combinations of 1’s and 0’s to talk to each other in some language other than projectile vomit. This normally requires quite a few cuss words and objects capable of taking a tumultuous thrashing.

Suffice it to say, by the time my weekend rolls around I am plagued and comatose of working with machines. That is precisely why my latest endeavor with my personal PC was so flipping annoying. I remember it as if it were yesterday…

January 24, 2010: Hour 0

It all started as I was setting up my PC from a recent LAN party. I had purchased a new hard drive several weeks prior because of an ominous clicking noise my computer had taken to emitting. I feared the hard drive may soon crash. (For the non-tech reader, this means I lose all my photos and e-mails. Yes that can happen, and no I will not back up your files.) Because I was being extra proactive, I purchased this new hard drive with the intent of moving all my files to it. Thus, all my precious stuff would be safe from the failing hardware.

Since I was extra motivated that day, I decided to go forward with the copy. I spent several minutes searching online for the best tool to clone one’s hard drive for free. My search landed me on an older Norton product, Ghost 2003 (henceforth known as ‘Highly Unreliable Gamble Effectively Purged Own System’ or HUGEPOS).

HUGEPOS is relatively straightforward. You’re asked to select a source and a destination hard drive. Then you click a little clone button, and the software reboots and copies one drive to another. In theory.

In really, HUGEPOS does the exact opposite of what it is supposed to do and DESIMATES both hard drives. Here’s how it goes down in non-computer terms.

HUGEPOS rebooted my computer and then made itself a house. This house is right in the middle of the highway between me and my stuff. Because this house is there, I can’t get to any of my stuff without first bulldozing through the house. The house is suppose to go away as soon as my stuff is all nice and copied. The problem here is my stuff did not copy because HUGEPOS is a huge POS.

My stuff did not copy because HUGEPOS was too old and did not understand what my newfangled hard drive was. So, instead of copying my hard drive, or moving its stupid house off the road, it blinked at me with the brain damaged look of a computer programmer who I hit repeatedly with a bat for inventing HUGEPOS.

January 24, 2010: Hour 1

At first I didn’t realized the massive trouble I was in. Oh sure, HUGEPOS didn’t actually do its job, but I was unaware of this whole “house in the road” situation. So I did what any good techie would do and rebooted my computer again. Instead of booting to Windows like a good PC, I was presented with the black and white letters of HUGEPOS asking to try the copy again. I told it no. It blinked repeatedly at me with the brain damaged look of the project leader who oversaw the creation of HUGEPOS.

No matter, thought I. I’ll simply reboot again and quit out of HUGEPOS before it starts. This proved impossible. Now I was nervous.

I sprang into action on my spare laptop and Googled the issue. I found many people had this issue with HUGEPOS. Apparently it was common for Norton products in general to be huge worthless pos’s. There was a solution; According to Norton themselves, if I broke into a window on this house in the middle of the highway, I could sneak through a back door and get to my stuff.

So, I broke into the window and snuck into the house. Inside, there was a startling sight; I saw HUGEPOS blinking repeatedly with the brain damaged look of the marketing executive who thought a picture of a PC’s ghost should inspire confidence in the product not killing your PC.

January 24, 2010: Hour 3

Now things were getting desperate. This ridiculous house in the middle of the highway was NOT moving. I had tried every way of bypassing it with the computer alone. The next step, according to dedicated forum crawlers, was to use a boot disk. Yes, that’s right, a floppy disk. You know, one of those things that no computer or laptop has had a drive for since 1999. They’re small, square, and vaguely resemble something I want to heave across the room. Apparently, if I made this disk it would act like a wrecking ball against this stupid house in the middle of the highway between me and my stuff. There was a problem though.

I had no floppy drive on my PC. So I tried to make a boot CD instead. To do this at all, I had to install HUGEPOS on my laptop.

January 24, 2010: Hour 5

After finally getting a working version of HUGEPOS downloaded and installed again, I entered the boot disk utility. This had an option to make a bootable CD. Hallelujah! I set to work making one right away …only… what is this? It asks me to insert a floppy disk. Well that did confuse me since I was under the impression we were making CDs here.

I checked online.

“Oh yes,” says the forums. “The option to make a bootable CD requires a floppy.” I stared at the laptop screen, blinking repeatedly with the brain damaged look of someone who just read “The option to create a bootable CD requires a floppy.”

January 24, 2010: Hour 6

It had become apparent to me I NEEDED a floppy drive to make this boot disk to get rid of this stupid house in the middle of the highway between me and my stuff. I had one option; on my old PC that had been mostly dead for years sat a neglected floppy drive. I could not hook this up to my laptop, since laptops and PC components are racist against one another. I could not hook this to my poor disheveled PC since I was unable to boot into Windows to make the disk. My only option was to resurrect my old PC. I had to bring my old PC back to life in order to make a wrecking ball boot disk to destroy the stupid house sitting in the middle of the highway between me and my stuff.

I hit the power button on my old PC. It did not turn on.

January 24, 2010: Hour 9

It’s funny how angry you can get at inanimate things when they seem to be “winning.” Here I was nine hours into my repair efforts (which, I will remind you, were all started by trying to PREVENT this type of thing from happening) and nothing was working. My new PC, my old PC and my laptop all seemed to be laughing at me and pointing their twisted RAM in my direction.

“HAHAHAHAHA, U c@n’ts f1x d3m Pr0b13mZ!!! ZOMG L0LZZZZZZZZZ!”

Shut up, PC. I made you what you are, and I can destroy you.

“NOPE! Iz @11r3dy the DEAD!”

The blasted thing was right. It was right until I finally isolated the last problem, and the old girl sprang to life. I had brought my old PC back online! Now I just needed to install HUGEPOS for a THIRD time and make a boot disk!

Disk… that’s when it dawned on me. I had no disks.

I could have cried I suppose. I did the next best thing. At 9:00 PM eastern standard time, I went to sleep.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 5:39 pm and is filed under rant, saga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.