My computer is a hazard. My fiancée (I can say that now, I'm divorced) decided we actually would be living here a couple more years (it took a year for it to sink in), so she decided time to clean-up and organise.

Which means my computers in the tiny dining area of our apartment needed to be moved. While I was out.

I come home. Wow, she really spiffied the place up, it's nice.

I sit down at my desktop. Old Hitachi monitor (big, heavy) in front of me on a glass (cheap, fragile) desk. I tap my old IBM keyboard (it's a tank. You can kill people (multiples in one swing) with this thing).

My X screen saver kicks me my password, I log in, and the screen is frozen.

Hrmph.

I Control-Alt-F1 to bounce to a text console. I see disk errors streaming by.

Hrmph again.

I glance over to my right, where my Frankenstein core-duo PC is sitting open, hard disk hanging out a few inches away on the glass desk. Hey, I never said it was in a good spot, or I had any right leaving it there.

The disk is not plugged in, neither power or SATA data.

Hrmph again. But now, a bit harder. Maybe a WTF or 2. But hey, at least those disk errors streaming by aren't really errors, they just mean it can't see it's disk. No problem. Powerdown.

Plug disk back in.

Power up.

I see my standard startup to the point of grub menu. Choose any option, though, and the boot crashes out with file system errors, and dmesg shows some pretty nasty disk errors being spit out.

The sinking feeling hits. What exactly have I just lost? I'm not the best with personal backups. I'm really good at work related, though, so for the most part I'm not worried about cash flow.

Hmm, anything typed got posted somewhere, the web is my memory, or it got emailed, and gmail has it.

The sinking feeling rises for a bit. I'm still hopeful at this point.

Ok, triage. Reboot system with knoppix. I can mount my home dir. Whew. The sinking feeling starts whining, I'm not paying attention to it. I pop in a TB USB drive, and start copying.

The disk errors pop back up. ARRRHHG!!! The sinking feeling goes: nya nya nya nya nya.

Ok, so I've got real damage. The copy continues. I can expect occasional damaged files. Such is life.

Recovery plan: Get a new hard disk, pop it in, format Ubuntu Desktop, install a few libraries for my Perl code, move on.

On the other hand, if Craig's list had anything good, maybe I'd try that.

I saw an ad for rackmount servers. Dual Xeon (3.? Ghz), 2GB memory, dual 80GB hot swap disk, supermicro mb.

$100 each.

I got 2.

I had to go back the next day, there were no disks. Ooops. The guy handed me 4 disks.

Disk in, turn on, hear the rocket ship take off. The fans are LOUD. Ok, hopefully I'll be able to turn them "down".

Used the SATA MB Raid controller to mirror them. Ubuntu saw the controller, and asked if I'd like to use it. YAY! Finally a server install that just works with the MB raid. I'm going to see if I can use the mirrors in the other box. Nice to really be able to swap back and forth between gear.

Install took 30 minutes, and the system came up cleanly. And then I shut it down, I had to leave for a wedding. I installed the box the same time I was getting dressed for it. Now that's multitasking!

But I still didn't have a desktop to use. So I picked up a 1TB barracuda for $100 at Bestbuy, and then splurged on a new monitor at Sam's.

23" LG Ultra Slim LED Monitor - $190.
http://www.samsclub....uctId=prod1270365

This thing is simply beyond perfect. I love it. And now the heaviest thing on my glass desk is my laptop.

Ok, started screwing around, swapping monitor, install new disk, pop in the Ubuntu Server disk. Bad move. It didn't like my network connection. Huh?

Pop in knoppix, Adriane version.

http://www.knopper.n...ane/index-en.html

Same one I used to copy the old disk to the USB drive. But this time my sound was turned up. The damn thing talks to you. Nice job if you are blind, incredibly annoying if you are not. I was unable to turn if off. Apt-get removed a piece of it and killed my X windows.

Screw that. Ubuntu Desktop installed in 20 minutes.

Knoppix has a Compiz extension called ADD helper. I NEED it. I never knew I did, but now I know. I need to track it down for Ubuntu. (which I'm tracking down and installing while writing this, it's in the Plugins Extra package:
http://wiki.compiz.org/Plugins/Addhelper. Yay, it works. I feel my brain relax when it is turned on).

Ok, so I popped the old disk back into the SATA card, and turned it on, hoping to go into salvage mode.

Click click click whirrr, cough, cough, click, click. . . . click. .. . . . . click. Old disk is officially dead.

And then that sinking feeling came back and taunted me, but screw that, I've got almost everything I wanted on the USB drive. I WIN!

cp -rvp and 4 hours later, I'm back. And now ready to post, since I hate to whine while I'm doing it online. I'll setup the servers in my bedroom closet. Let's see how much heat and noise they make.

Oh, and we had a horrible time as my fiance thought I was upset with her. Horrible because she was unhappy that I might be unhappy. She found out you really can't move live computer equipment without me around, the disks tend to fall out and bounce on the floor. Lesson learned.

So of course I explained how I used this as an excuse to get a bunch of new toys and I lost nothing, so it was great.

Triple win.

Sorry.
Agreed.