Death of a Digital Darkroom
There are intentionally no images with this post. And it pains me to post something this way. But let me just share with you WHY this post has no pictures:
It has been an interesting couple of weeks around here....beginning with the loss of my job in Cube World (which actually was a blessing in disguise on a couple of levels), continuing on to the hole in the radiator of my hubby's commuter, while at the same time, our daughter sold her car and needed to purchase another, more reliable vehicle immediately. SO for a brief minute, we were down two cars. She was able to procure a new one quickly, in far better shape than her old car, so that problem dissolved quickly. Still down one vehicle, with hubby's car in the shop, we also had two entire walls of electrical sockets go dead randomly overnight. A call to the electrician took care of that, but not without cost, naturally. But for me, the worst event was yet to come: the death of my digital darkroom.
Yes, the same day we discovered the dead electrical lines (a mess in itself, because in this cobbled together 60-something-year-old house, built by generations of unskilled do-it-yourselfers), I went to my desktop computer to sit down and get to some photo editing and filing work done, only to find it was not on. Figuring the brief outage of flipping breakers to be the most likely culprit, I pressed the button to fire it back up-- only the system wouldn't load. I had power and lights and sound, everything appeared to be close to normal, other than not booting Windows in a flash like it normally did, so I continued to investigate.
Long story short, after several hours of research and tinkering, I found that the hard drive was shot. Dead, and unrecognizable to the motherboard. I could boot into BIOS and check or change settings, and it recognized the CD-ROM drive, but the hard drive no longer existed, in the eyes of the ASUS P7P55 LX board. Even swapping ports and SATA cords did no good at all, so it was confirmed. My PC was kaput, and the cost of a new hard drive was looming.
The existing drive, which initially I was told was a newer one (this was a custom build made for us by a family member, and I have had not a stitch of trouble from it for the year I have used it) actually turned out to be over 7 years old, according to the manufacturer's serial number. So to be fair, having gotten the last year's worth of great usage out of it was lucky. Seems it was time for a new one anyhow. I really, REALLY would like a Solid State Drive, but for the moment, with less income and more outgo, thanks to other things also dying on us, that just isn't in the cards. So, after a couple days research, I think I've settled on a new internal hard drive made by the same manufacturer, Western Digital. After all, the dead drive did last over 7 years, and I have been very happy with the external hard drive I have from them, which I use for storage and backup. And the silver lining? I can upgrade to a 2Tb drive, from the old 500 Gb, so bonus for the photographer!
Which brings me to another point: backup and storage. Yes, I am a bad computer housekeeper. I do not do regular backups like I ought. In fact, after losing the Cube World job, I was overjoyed to think of all the time I now have to organize photos and files, clean up my PC workstation and my hubby's laptop, edit photos, update the website, and generally have more time to shoot and write, and pursue a freelance career. But my last backup was at least 6 months ago (shame on me!) and even though my intentions were good, wouldn't you know the crash would come a day or two before I actually got around to the chore. This is a prime example of how procrastination kills.
So today, my darling daughter will be stopping off at Best Buy to pick me up a new hard drive, which I can get installed over the next day or so. I am not certain how I will get Windows loaded back onto the PC, as this custom build did not come with any product key, or recovery or backup CDs, and I really can't go out and buy a new Windows cd. I just don't know. But my research has given me a couple of ideas, so I'll be looking around. On a bright note, I can still access some of my programs on my hubby's laptop, from which I am writing this today; I can't do any editing of images on here, as my editing programs and image files were all on the dead hard drive. Sure hoping I can retrieve them off of it still! Furthermore, I did get four pictures framed and ready for my very first gallery representation in a new art gallery here in town (so excited, opening night is March 3!). And I got the living room ceilings cleaned-- what a chore THAT was! Kitchen is next, i expect that to be a bigger chore, even though it is half the size. So the temporary loss of my Digital Darkroom isn't so horrible....just hoping I can get the new drive installed and get the PC back up and running soon! I know that is going to be fun stuff!
Oh, and remember that post about DiskDigger© , when I had to recover some lost phoots from an old CD? Well, since it did such a bang-up job on that small project, I am going to plunk down the $14.99 for the full license key, and see what it can do with a bad hard drive!
So, if there seems to be less presence of ImaginationRanch Photography on the Interwebs this week, now you know why. Thanks for allowing me to vent a bit, too. But don't worry, everything always seems to work out for me, and I fully expect to be off and running again even stronger than before! See you in the funny papers!