{"id":1892,"date":"2010-07-14T00:01:19","date_gmt":"2010-07-14T08:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=1892"},"modified":"2013-02-10T21:54:42","modified_gmt":"2013-02-11T04:54:42","slug":"signs-of-impending-doom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=1892","title":{"rendered":"Signs of Impending Doom"},"content":{"rendered":"

What noise does a hard drive make just before it dies? Well, it goes something like this: Tica-tica-tica-tica-zing!<\/em> I’m serious.
\n
\nI remember my first hard drive death experience: I was working on the computer and suddenly I noticed the hard drive was making an unusual noise.<\/p>\n

Did it always make that sound? Had I merely not noticed?<\/p>\n

The noise grew louder as I worked. So, being cautious, I did a backup immediately.<\/p>\n

This was the late 1980s and backups were done to floppy disks. I had graduated from 1.2M 5 1\/4-inch floppies to the 1.44M 3 1\/2-inch floppies. It was a 40MB drive. So I went through a stack of 25 or so diskettes to backup the whole thing, or merely the parts I used.<\/p>\n

A day later the hard drive starting making pinging noises. Then it died. I feel fortunately that I was warned; I bought a replacement at a local computer store, installed it, installed DOS, and ran my backup program’s Restore utility. I was back to normal in a few hours.<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, I had a hard drive die during an earthquake. It was 1989 and the temblor came in at only about 4.9 on the Richter scale. Still, it was enough to jostle the heads on the hard drive and crash them into the platters.<\/p>\n

That was a 90MB hard drive that the earthquake killed. I hadn’t done a backup in 6 months<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Yeah: YIKES!<\/p>\n

I also remember paying $1,000 for that drive.<\/p>\n

The reason I lost only 6 months of stuff was because I still had a backup. I suppose after a time I got lazy, tired of shuffling in-and-out some 45 floppies to complete the backup. (After the disaster I bought a streaming tape backup drive.)<\/p>\n

Sometimes hard drive noise doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes it means impending doom.<\/p>\n

Then again, environment can play a role.<\/p>\n

I knew a guy who had to manually spin up his hard drive in the morning to get it going. He used a plastic cocktail straw to do it. Kept the case off his PC just to get at the thing.<\/p>\n

My old Australian pen pal Ray used to tell me how difficult it was to get his hard drive up and running on cold mornings.<\/p>\n

Even here, in the summer in the Pacific Northwest, I have environment issues with hard drives: My elderly Macintosh doesn’t like the heat, and it’s hard drive ceases and hangs when the temperature in my office gets too hot.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the environmental issues are signs of impending doom. Regardless, I always have a backup (or three) fresh. There’s no point in taking a chance, especially with the important stuff we keep on computer hard drives in the 21st Century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What noise does a hard drive make just before it dies? Well, it goes something like this: Tica-tica-tica-tica-zing!<\/em> I’m serious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-1892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-troubleshooting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1892"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4234,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1892\/revisions\/4234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}