My Superpower: Breaking Computer-Based or Related Items

Oh my goodness. It has been a crazy several days. Last week, Tuesday morning, to be exact, Troy bought me a new domain for a project I’m doing. Well, I tried to set it up just like this one, but for some reason, it just wasn’t working. Try as I might and multiple phone calls/chats with GoDaddy customer service later, it was the end of the week (Friday) and I still couldn’t even get the login page for my new domain to show up. So, pretty much, an entire wasted week. Couldn’t figure it out. Couldn’t make it work. GoDaddy hadn’t a clue.

Then, I posted to a WordPress group on Facebook and a very kind and helpful gentleman spent over an hour working with me and my domain and calling my domain host and doing all sorts of tech-geek stuff to FINALLY get it all to work. My domain is now running perfectly and I’m very happy (and so very thankful) that this gentleman took the time and effort to help me figure out what was going on.

Move on to Saturday.

When attempting to update THIS blog in Bluehost (updating the WordPress version), I somehow erased my entire site.

Cue panic.

After updating, it took me back to Day 1 of my blog. It was all gone. Theme, settings, plugins, POSTS. All of it.

Thankfully, (again) someone was able to help me. This time it was my good friend, Nathan, who is practically my little (10 days older) brother and I’ve known since 5th grade. I learned a few weeks ago when he stopped by to visit that he works for Bluehost and when my site vanished, I messaged him.

Well, not right away. I waited until after I tried a few things, unsuccessfully.

Nathan got back to me pretty quick and said he thought he knew what the problem was and said that once he got to a computer he could fix it pretty quick.

15 minutes later, my blog was back.

Fast forward to today.

I sat here at my computer earlier today, after spending the morning picking tomatoes, strawberries and blueberries from the yard and going through the front and back gardens to pull weeds. I was feeling good. I was halfway done with laundry, had gotten the yard cleaned up, had eaten my huge salad for lunch and was ready to get some photos edited. I navigated to Amazon.com so I could stream 24 while I edited photos and pulled up Photoshop.

But something wasn’t right.

My computer locked up, Photoshop was being jumpy and Chrome wasn’t responding.

After waiting for my computer to chill out, I decided I needed to close everything and restart my computer.

Bad idea.

My computer started up nicely and  everything seemed to be running smoothly.

Until I opened Photoshop.

When I tried to navigate to my external hard drive (where all my photos from the past 10 years are), it wasn’t there. Just a blank white square.

Hmmmm, I thought, it’s taking a long time to load. My external drive usually takes a little while to load since I have to connect it after my computer starts because, for some reason, my computer keeps trying to boot from it even though I’ve told it not to.

Anyways, it didn’t load. And it didn’t load. And it didn’t load.

I tried disconnecting and reconnecting several times.

Nothing.

I restarted my computer again.

Nothing.

I powered off the external drive and turned it on again.

A drive showed up.

I clicked on it.

Popup: YOU NEED TO FORMAT THIS DRIVE BEFORE YOU CAN USE IT.

Oh.

My.

Hades.

My drive is dead.

Cue massive panic.

I pulled up Google and started googling as fast as I could. I searched all sorts of tech threads on how to fix this……………or to even figure out what the problem is.

All I could find was: “YOU ARE SCREWED.”

But that can’t be! In my digital forensics class last semester we were able to restore formatted flash drives. There has to be something to restore external hard drives.

I messaged my friend whose husband received his digital forensics certificate a few weeks ago.

No dice. He said I would need specialized equipment and that he could try to borrow it………………..if I lived in the same town. Drat.

Then I tried my friend, Nathan, again. He’s always been super techie. He gave me a few suggestions. I’m running one right now. It will take 8 hours to go through the drive (but at least it’s going through it!!!) to see how much data it can find and then I have to pay $70 before it will actually recover that data.

Another option (that i found when googling) is to run Linux off a flash drive and fix the broken MBR on the drive. I made the boot drive, but I’m hesitant to do it because 1) I barely know anything about using Linux and 2) the page with the instructions said I can still lose all my data.

All the while, my digital forensics class is still in the back of my mind. I went through the different modules until I found what I was looking for, only to discover that it won’t work. Maybe if my laptop had a bigger hard drive, but it’s physically impossible to pull 3T worth of data (okay, 2.5T) and put it onto a 1T hard drive. Not gonna work.

Then, while I’m stressing about whether I should use this program from the internet, pay for this other program or take my hard drive in and pay someone hundreds of dollars to MAYBE recover my 10 years worth of photos, Troy emails me back to say he knows how to recover hard drives.

Say what?

Normally, when I ask him for help, he tells me he doesn’t know (cuz I ask him about blog coding and digital forensics stuff) and to google it, so when I emailed him to tell him what was going on, I didn’t even think his response would be one I wanted to hear. But it was.

Now, I have to wait until tomorrow night to see if he can fix it. Right now, he’s out with work people at a business dinner and won’t be home until late. And even if he didn’t need down time from work when he gets home, I’m already running this other program on the drive that will take another 7 hours and 45 minutes. So, it will have to wait until tomorrow. I supposed I could cancel this other thing, but I’m hesitant to do anything with the drive and part of me is afraid that stopping this thing mid-scan would make things worse. Somewhat irrational, but that’s okay. Troy won’t want to work on it tonight (most likely) because he’ll be home late, so it won’t hurt anything to let this thing keep running.

So, since all my photos for blogs are on this seemingly broken drive, I’m going to go get a coconut popsicle out of the freezer and curl up with my cat on the couch. We’re going to watch some 24 and fold the last of the laundry.

I really feel like I’m bad luck these past few days. Maybe it’s just me and electronics. I still haven’t told the story about my dropping Troy’s $2,000 camera lens into the ocean in Vietnam. And then dropping another one onto the cement in Yogyakarta. And then dropping his lens cap into a waterfall in Bali. Or how I got glitter all up inside the camera he lets me use (he has two). Or how three weeks ago my Surface tablet just all the sudden quit working and it took over a week to get it able to ship off because when I called in, their return mailing system crashed and they couldn’t send me an address label.

Maybe I should take a break from electronics and computers for a while. They don’t seem to like me very much lately.