Fixin’ a Disk
Dammit! I got a phone call from RCS Printers who are supposed to be making me 5000 flyers and 350 assorted posters (100 A3 and 250 A4). They told me that the bride is pixellated on all three and the men are pixellated on the flyer. Also that the word “Marriage” is too close to the edge on the flyer (actually I suspected that, but forgot to fix it before sending to print). I’m confused about the pixellated shit - I did a trial print before sending it off, looked fine to me. I very much suspect what they mean is that the bride is out-of-focus. I would have expected a printers’, especially such a large and busy one, to know the different between blurred and pixellated but, WTF, they’re humans and humans are stupid. As for the men… ? I dunno, perhaps they mean that on the reverse of the flyer they’re faded? Yeah, I knew that, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to read the writing.
Anyway, I took the call in a library, which wasn’t really the best place, so couldn’t discuss it at length. By the time I got back here, they’d all gone home, so I’m left pondering.
Meantime I tried to track down the InDesign originals… you guessed it, they’re on my faulty hard-disk. Ah well, I was going to have to open up the machine and have a poke sooner or later, might as well make it sooner.
First job is to try and work out which drive is which. I have six (count ‘em) hard disks stuffed inside my machine (albeit one of them has been unplugged for months, it’s just taking up space) and as well as the two onboard IDE channels and two SATA I have a PCI card with another two IDEs. Cue lots of unplugging and re-plugging trying to work out which was which. In the process of which I discover that G:\ - my “general crap” drive full of warez, DVDs and junk which I thought crashed out about a month back, is actually still operational, either it works intermittently or I just knocked a cable somewhere. So that was quite a nice surprise, but far nicer would have been to have got D:\ - my data and everything drive - working.
No such luck yet, but my detective work has revealed that the problem with D:\ is likely to be fairly high-level: it shows up fine in the BIOS, and even Windows Disk Manager reports it as “Healthy (Active)”, it’s only when I try to browse to it or use any files off it that I get the “file or directory is corrupted and unreadable” error. Also the volume label (which I think was “Data”) is not showing up in Disk Manager or Explorer, the latter just refers to it as “Local Disk”.
So I’ve downloaded a couple of trial versions of disk recovery tools, am running one right at this moment which has happily located and is now scanning the disk. If it comes up with anything then I’ll have to sling the authors $70 or so, which will allow me to use the full recovery power of the software to copy all my files off somewhere else (hmmm, lemme scan through all those other disks to find one with 100gig of free space…). Once I’ve done that I’ll probably… well, you know me, I live dangerously, I’ll probably just re-format the dodgy disk and stick everything back on there again 
So, like I said before, all is not yet lost. It’s just… well, as is always the case with these type of events, it couldn’t have come at a much worse time.
But it’s nice to re-acquaint myself with the computer’s infernal internals every couple of months or so.