I’m excited and unnerved about the semester starting tomorrow. I’m settled in my new apartment, I have most of my textbooks, and I’m getting along great with my three roommates. Two of them are talkative, but they’re also considerate, and I expect things to quiet down once classes pick up.
My apartment is pretty nice — nicer than the one I had last year in the same complex. However, the Baylor people who brought our refridgerator in a few weeks ago did not feel like moving the hinges, so when it was moved into the only free corner in the kitchen, its handle was against the wall. This configuration makes it difficult to peek in the fridge to grab something quickly; you have to move against the wall, open the door fully, and then reach in. I took it upon myself to move the hinges.
Before I got started on the project in earnest, I brought my laptop into the kitchen, plugged it in, and rested it on the microwave so that I could listen to music on my headphones while I worked. This was a pretty good plan for about fifteen minutes. While my music player was humming through the middle of the Beatles’ White Album, I turned around for a screw or a drink and caught my foot on my headphone cord. My headphone cord grew taut and pulled my laptop from the top of the microwave to the floor four feet below. The computer looked okay, mostly, and the music kept playing after a short pause, so I thought things were alright. But then the music stopped entirely and my computer refused to do anything with the hard drive. I tried to reboot, but I heard a sickening “click-click-click” sound when I should have been seeing my operating system load. The delicate hard drive was as ill as a human would be after a five-story fall to concrete.
The drive is still not working. The most important stuff on it was backed up, and the rest isn’t worth spending several hundred dollars for professional data recovery, but I’m planning to try recovering the data myself. Every hard drive has one or more round platters with data on both sides, like a record. And just as a record player has a tonearm and needle that move to access the data on a record, a hard drive has a head on each side of the platter to read from and write to it. The “click-click-click” sound I heard is the sound a head makes when it’s not working, but the platters themselves should still have my data.
The recovery procedure is simple on its face: buy a working hard drive of the same model, remove its platters, and put the platters from the broken drive into the new one. The tricky part about the transplant is keeping all of the parts clean while the drives are gutted and exposed to the air. Professionals use clean rooms and clean suits to make contamination unlikely, just as surgeons do surgery in sterile rooms to keep germs from getting where they don’t belong. I’m going to do the procedure with Ziploc “gloves” on my dining room table and hope that I’m fast enough that dust doesn’t become a big problem. Whether it works or not, I’ll have to spend an hour or two of my time as well as $70 for the duplicate hard drive. If it doesn’t work, my data will still be gone, and there will be even less chance of recovery by the data recovery professionals that I’m not going to hire anyway. If it does work, I’ll probably spend the rest of the day pacing excitedly, pumping my fist, and smiling like I won the lottery.
The fridge is now humming happily with its hinges on the proper side. I decided to leave the handles where they were, though, because moving them isn’t really necessary, and because I and my roommates agree that it’s funny to have handles that don’t work, especially when we, with minds occupied by hunger or thirst, forget about the trick and reach for the useless handles ourselves.
