Energizer Bunny ... From HELL!

My computer issues keep on going ... and going ... and going ... and ....

OK, so I let the disk format run over night and this morning I started the cooy from my USB backup drive back onto my new images drive. 224GB takes rather a while to copy ... several hours in fact. I went downstairs and had a bit of lunch (Mennonite Chicken Soup ... mmmmm) then started watching Chocolat with Juliette Binoche (who was also incredible in The English Patient) and Johnny Depp ... the movie was lent to me by my friend after my birthday dinner and is one of her favorites.

I was enjoying it until it hung on the PS3. I didn't want to figure that out right away, so I went upstairs and checked the copy status. Half an hour left ... I puttered about until there ten minutes and then got the urge to finish Chocolat. Turned out to be easy to get by the hang, just back up a touch and then fast forward over the hang spot. Worked perfectly.

So I watched the whole movie, which I think is one of the best I've ever seen. It taps deep emotions, very hard to describe and I sure won't in public :-)

When I got back upstairs, I was met with blank screens and dead silence ... oh oh.

Sure enough, the power switch was unresponsive. I smelled the back of the machine (dogs smell each other, humans smell their power supplies) and caught a whiff of that acrid burnt board smell, so I ripped trucked on back to Over the Top once more. I obviously took the 1TB disk along and got my refund. I picked up a new OCZ 500W supply with modular cabling. This is not only easier to install, but also improves air circulation, something that helps a lot when running in a warm room (the machine was in the basement for the last 5 years at least.)

I got home and had the machine rebuilt in half an hour. It booted first time and I am in heaven. I am just running a disk compare between the new images folder and the backup using the venerable WINDIFF. So far no differences ... but this looks to be another multi-hour task ... *sigh* ...

Anyway ... all is well that ends well. Assuming of course that this is the end of the computer problems for now ...

Edit: And that's it. WINDIFF reports identical file sets (and it checked them at the binary level) so I am switching back to live mode with a 500GB images drive. The only question remaining is whether Carbonite will be utterly confused by the new disk. I hope not.