Douglas-fir Blog

Almost six weeks ago on Easter Sunday, and if I remember correctly, less than an hour after I posted my “Berlin Report,” something happened to my laptop. I was just about to use Skype to call home, when all of a sudden the application froze. Within a minute, everything else had frozen, too. I was annoyed, but guessed that the problem could be resolved by restarting. But instead of booting up properly, after powering up, the screen went grey, and I could hear a sound like a whirr-click, whirr-click coming from the general area of the hard drive. My fears were confirmed when I brought my laptop to a service center in Stuttgart. The hard drive had failed.

Wikipedia’s article on the “click of death” seems to describe the experience I had:


“On non-Zip systems (usually a hard disk), the click of death refers to a similar phenomenon; when a hard disk has a hard error or servomechanism failure, the head actuator will buzz and click as the drive tries to recover from the error. Since the media is not removable on these drives, the defect is almost always due to physical abuse or a manufacturing error.”


Unfortunately, I had not backed up much of my data since coming to Germany, and the chances of recovering the data were slim, I was told. Nonetheless, I agreed to pay 60 Euros (about $80) to have the service people try to recover the data. I would pay the amount whether they recovered anything or not. Thankfully, the replacement of the drive was under warranty, even at a service center in Germany.

My prayers were answered when I got a phone call informing me that a partial backup had been managed, about a quarter of the data that had been on the drive. Later, when I was able to view the data, I found that almost everything of importance had been saved, including a diary I had kept, and my most recent photos.

I ended up having to re-install the system and all applications I had used. I completely lost my huge iTunes music library; however, most of it was backed up. I lost a few other files of minor import. The drive containing the backup of my iTunes library is in Portland, and I have decided not to risk having it mailed over here. I have mostly turned to internet radio as a source of music to listen to.

I feel I have come out of the experience blessed, and with a reminder to keep a proper perspective on what is really important in life. Even if I didn’t recover so much as a byte, I thought before I knew the outcome, I would still be greatly blessed.

I was planning to post blog entries about my other trips within days of my Berlin post. Obviously this has not happened, and I’m now very behind in on my blog. Although I’ve had a working computer for several weeks now, I’ve been busy with many things. Classes for the summer semester started on April 16. I’ve been busy with coursework ever since. I will try to fill the gaps of the last month within the next few days.


< My Easter Sunday 2007 portrait, taken just hours before my hard drive crashed. >