The Day Of The Phoenix

Well folks as Stephanie posted for me, my computer decided to try and commit suicide on me on Friday.

Friday was started out bad, I think it was just one big cursed day. It began with me almost being late for school after sleeping through my alarm a good 15 mins. I made it just in time for morning roll call and dispatch (truck and trailer assignment for the day). I had another road test that went really good, I did scrub 1 curb on a tight right hand turn with my left front steer tire, but I knew and told my instructor that I might. I didn't jump the curb or anything, but I should have button hooked the turn just a little. I will post a pic of what a button hook turn looks like when I get my PC back up to full capacity.

After school is when things REALLY went to hell in a hand basket. When I got home, I check the mail, and I received 2 checks from financial aid, but it was WAY too much money. A call to the school revealed that they somehow someone didn't bill my my student account correctly nor did they enroll me right. My course is broken into 3 parts, 2- 3 week blocks and 1 4 week block with a CDL test fee. Well I paid the first 3 weeks out of pocket, and the 2nd and 3rd block plus my CDL test fee were supposed to be paid for using my financial aid account. But somehow, I didn't get enrolled in the 2nd 3 week block, even though I am currently in it! I find this aggravating as I have spent tons of time working with the admissions staff and everytime they tell me everything is setup and correct, only to find out weeks later that something is not right. So once again I have to jump through hoops with the admissions department to get this straightened out.

After that "little" event my damn toilet broke! Apparently the plastic little arm that connects the flush handle to the flapper inside the toilet broke, maintenance didn't have the part needed so I had to wait for repairs till Saturday. No big deal, just a minor inconvenience. I checked my email and when to the bank to deposit the 2 checks from financial aid so the money is available on Monday when I have to pay for the 2nd 3 week block that the school failed to bill my account for, again not that big of a deal just another inconvenience.

However, upon my return home I planned to spend my weekend filling out online job application with some trucking companies to get some pre-hires, only to find my computer locked up. I didn't think much about it, just restarted it and got some information together to fill out apps. But when my computer starting to boot back up I got an error say that a system file was damaged, missing, or corrupt. Another inconvenience, or so I thought. I grabbed my WinXP cd tossed it in and started the repair process when suddenly my monitor when into standby mode. Humm, a little bit of a problem. I can't see what is going on with the repair process so I can't do the repair. So I am forced to reboot again. However this time, I still get no video and the On-board self test (it is a audio deal) tells me my video card has failed self test. Hoping it is just a glitch, I restart again. No dice. I tried this a few times, till the Video card kicked back in, however now the bios will not recognize my hard drives! WTF!! So I reset the bios, and reboot. This time the bios sees the hard drives, but no more than 30 seconds later my video card craps out and stays that way. Dead Jim, Dead!

Just fucking great! Now i have to buy a new video card as my motherboard does not have on board video and requires a video card. I called Stephanie in a bent out of shape rage, and asked her to check some video card prices online for me for some area stores, then it was off to Best Buy. $141.32 later, I am back home with a new video card, a ATI Radeon 9550. Not a great video card and definitely not what I would have purchased for an upgrade, but it is decent and cheap and the best I can do right now considering my budget.

So I should be good to go right? Wrong! Of course the new video card works like a charm, OS I can now see what is going on, however now my primary hard drive takes a crap on me! OM MY F()&*)^*(%$ GOD!!!!!!!! My 160GB hard drive has everything on it, and normally I have a system backup just in case of things like this, but my last backup go damaged somehow and the new backup was supposed to be created Saturday at 2am. Does me now good however at 8pm on Friday. So I have no system backup, and now my hard drive will not even spin up. SHIT!

In a attempt to keep you all from getting bored out of your skulls I will just hit the highlights, but trust me when I say that this was not an easy process. After screwing with EVERYTHING, and striping the entire system down and rebuilding it several times, including a few good kicks just for measure and attitude adjustment, was finally able to get my backup drive working. That is when things got worse. I began installing WinXP on my backup hard drive so I at least had something I could boot into while I worked on my dead 160GB drive, when my CD-Rom drive apparently got hungry and literally tried to eat my WinXP CD.

Now WAIT JUST ONE MINUTE DAMNIT, no one ever told me you had to feed a damn CD-Rom drive, that is not in any of my manuals!!!

After fighting with the cd-rom drive it finally gave me back my WinXP cd, scratched to hell I might add, and now has sections that are no longer readable, so I can't install XP on the backup drive. OMG!!!! I just wanted to throw the whole PC right off my balcony into the street (after I removed the new video card for a return that is....). But I resisted that tasty temptation. So on Saturday morning I went down to a local PC shop and borrowed a clean WinXP CD, I finally got WinXP installed on the backup drive, and what happened RIGHT after it gets installed!! CD-ROM ATE that disk too! So out that drive goes! But, I got WinXP installed that is the important thing. While XP was updating I took my 2 CDs down to a local video game shop and got them both resurfaced, they look good as new.

After spending hours screwing with my 160GB drive I finally got a glimmer of life from the drive and pounced on the chance to get my data off the drive. I did, thank god, as I thought for sure that all was lost. I also have a brand new 80GB drive that is a replacement for another 80gb drive that failed on me a few months ago. All 3 of these drives are Western Digital hard drives. The brand new 80GB drive is DOA right out of the box. I will have to contact Western Digital and arrange for replacements, but I really think I need to buy a NON-Western Digital hard drive for a backup drive as I have no confidence in them anymore. Might just be a bad batch, but they have some serious quality control issues.

Right now I am up and running at about 20% as my backup drive is only a 60GB drive and is barley holding up with all the data on it. I am can't even install 1/10th of my programs on this small of a drive.

So things are going to be a bit limited for a while till I can get a replacement drive and rebuild my file system. I hope this next week goes better.