Sigh
Decided to switch from day job to magazine editing around 7 tonight, but stopped to check email first. Ended up on the phone with various people dealing with various stuff for the next four hours. (With, admittedly, a bit of miscellaneous telephone socializing thrown in somewhere in the middle when an East-coast friend called.) Finally sat down to do some editing around 11, put in a nice calming CD to listen to while I edited—and my computer hung.
Sigh. Okay, annoying, but not really a big problem. Reboot. Wait. Wait longer than usual. Oh, look, what's that? It's a dialog box. It says: "This disk is unreadable. Do you want to initialize it?"
No, I don't want to initialize it, you stupid machine. That's my OS X partition. I don't think it has any absolutely essential data on it, but it would be hella hard (and time-consuming) to reconstruct (all those OS X applications), and it does have all my MP3 files on it (which are replaceable from the original CDs, but at a large time cost). Dammit. And I haven't yet gotten ahold of the Retrospect beta that backs up OS X volumes, so that volume is not backed up. (The OS 9 partition, where all my important data is, is backed up.)
Reboot again, just in case. Same damn thing. Off to the Web. Download Norton Utilities for the Mac version 6, the version that sorta kinda knows how to deal with OS X volumes. Run it. Wait. Wait a very long time. Eventually realize that I can edit (slowly) while Disk Doctor runs in the background.
Thank goodness for Symantec and NUM. It fixed all the mysterious errors that had somehow suddenly appeared on that partition when I inserted the CD; it papered over all the bad blocks. I ran it again just to be sure, and it found and fixed more stuff.
Everything looked fine, so I rebooted into OS X—and the NUM file scanner told me, just before the computer shut down, that my OS 9 partition also had major problems.
Too late to stop rebooting. Log in. Discover that NUM won't run under OS X. Reboot into OS 9 again. Run NUM again, this time on the startup volume, which means I can't do any other work while it runs. Wait a very long time.
In the end, it fixed all the problems there too. But it means that six and a half hours after I sat down to edit, I've done maybe half an hour worth of edits. Damn it.
On the plus side, I've spent most of the last couple hours catching up on some Asimov's stories that I'd failed to read when they came out. Also on the plus side, it could have been much worse; as major computer failures go, this one was awfully benign and took relatively little time and energy to fix.
But now it's 1:45 in the morning, and I really need some sleep, but I'm already way way behind on this edit, so I think I'll be staying up a while longer.
Also, my computer has taken to occasionally going off to be by itself for a while. (It was doing this on and off all day, usually while I was using Eudora. Just suddenly everything goes away and the disk clicks to itself for a while. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Pause. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Pause. Repeat for about two minutes, then suddenly come back and act as though nothing happened.)
Sigh.
But don't mind me; I wouldn't be happy if I didn't have something to complain about. Whine whine. Time to stop whining and start editing.