Rosio Pavoris

Apparently my mom managed to hose my parents’ computer’s hard drive on Wednesday, and apparently passing all of my computer-related classes finally convinced them I know something about them, so I was charged with recovering their data, if possible.
The problem was that it would boot, but then halfway into loading Windows it would make a grinding noise and error out.

The first thing I tried was just to boot the Lunix from a live CD, but apparently the DVD drive had been broken for five or six years, and the CD-ROM drive they added below it (rather than replace the DVD drive, for whatever reason) wasn’t recognised by the BIOS at all.
So I tried a bootable USB stick, as the BIOS purported to support booting from USB devices, but apparently it was full of lies.
Since there was a separate option for booting from “USB CD-ROM”, I even brought down my eleven-year-old external CD-R drive, but no dice.

By then my dad managed to find a Windows 95 rescue floppy, which got me into DOS, but then I realised I don’t actually know a whole lot about DOS, and if there’s a way to manually mount drives it fails to, I couldn’t figure it out in under five minutes.
It did, however, confirm the floppy drive worked, so I proceeded to make a Damn Small Linux boot floppy (after spending twenty minutes looking for a floppy that wasn’t either full of what my dad considered to be important data or degraded beyond usability), which also failed in interesting ways.
By then it was midnight and I had a headache, so I gave up.

The next day, my dad decided he was going to buy a new computer regardless of what happened to the old one, so I just took out the hard drive and mounted it in my own deskop. I didn’t originally want to do that because I’d never fucked around with hardware before, but it was actually pretty straightforward (though I had to guess at the jumper settings; the drive was old enough that the company that made it had been bought out by a company which was subsequently bought out by Maxtor, which, as you know, was bought out by Seagate in early 2006; documentation was rather hard to find).
Nearly all of their data was still intact, so I made back-ups and proceeded to scavenge the rest of the computer for usable parts.

Slim pickings, though. It was seven or eight years old, though other than the HD and the DVD drive, it was in remarkably good condition.

I did get a new PSU out of it; my old one had been moderately broken for ages, and profoundly broken since last August (it refused to boot without considerable prodding for five to ten minutes, making noises like crap cars starting on cold mornings, which was actually rather funny; this is also why I got a laptop). It’s only 300 Watt compared to my old one’s 350, but that’s still rather more than my desktop actually uses.
I also added their RAM to my own, bringing the total to 768 MB (from 512; I’m not sure who decided that would be a proportionate amount of RAM for a 3.2 GHz CPU). The HD is legitimately shot, or I’d have kept that as well. Too noisy anyway.

What I really needed, though, is a new video card, but interestingly, there was none in my parents’ computer, even though they did pay for one, and they were given a box and manuals and everything.
My dad went to the store we got it today to see about prices for a new one and confronted them about this, and they told him the motherboard didn’t support video cards, and anyway the on-board graphics controller was more powerful than the dedicated €500 card they were supposed to get. When asked why they still charged for the card and gave us the box and manuals, they changed the subject.

Forgetting to plug in a card I can sort of understand. Lying about it when you’re confronted with it, though, just smells like fraud, especially considering the exact same thing apparently happened to my sister’s boyfriend (who did notice fairly quickly; as for why my parents didn’t notice until eight years later: presumably you have parents who own a computer; they could forget the monitor and it’d still be weeks before they’d complain).

As such, I am now also charged with finding a new computer-selling place. Since the options are fairly limited in Tienen itself, I’ll probably just ask around in Leuven.
Which will have to happen tomorrow, since Easter vacation starts next week. Wooh.

In unrelated news, there’s something considerably entertaining about randomly finding pictures of people you used to sort of know on websites dedicated to archiving pictures of camwhores. Themightytango is prettier with no clothes on.

In equally unrelated news, I am not a meme.