This highway is done bent on killing us.

[reddragdiva]

Aaand exhale ... slightly. The laptop disk is in the Mac and I am presently putting what I need to recover into a folder in /tmp (I could copy the lot, but 13 gigabytes over 10Mb Ethernet is ... not ideal) and will copy it across once that's in order. Cross fingers I will have long-awaited photos, at least some, up over the weekend.

Geeky details: The laptop won't boot. Not even as much as it was before. I can get a little way into it, but I'll have to strip it down and rebuild it. The Compaq Evo N410c appears to be a hell of a lot easier to work on than the Thinkpad 560X, so I expect it not to actually be too hard. In the meantime, I need to get the data.

The hard disk is remarkably easy to extract. I got it out of its Compaq mounting thingy and attached it to the 2.5"-3.5" adapter, then tried putting it into red (the FreeBSD box — FreeBSD can mount ext2/3 for reading with no problems). I tried all possible combinations of the existing disks and this disk and couldn't get the machine to even boot with it in. It does some half-smart IDE device reconfiguring on boot, so you can't tell where it thinks your disks are just because they're, e.g., the master device on chain 0. So that was futile. Thankfully it came up okay after I put it back how it was.

Next trick: put it into the Mac, boot this handy installation of Ubuntu for PowerPC that's lurking on one of the disk partitions. Just today I was wondering if we should have bothered with this ... now it's saving my laptoppy arse. mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt and I'm away.

Latest domestic fuckup: the dishwasher is out of salt or something's clogged. I really think the house is taking the piss now. The kittens are using the litter tray okay, Transco's been around and given the gas the all-clear and British Gas will be around tomorrow morning to do the same for the boiler. Then tomorrow I accompany a gaggle of sxxy d3th ch1xx0rs (redcountess, arkady, quiet000001, ruthi) to B-Movie. And will regain the power of speech after my third pint. Please throw all your packs of cloves at me. I will be in dire need of them.

Comments

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

How many is actually required for a gaggle?

[reddragdiva]

The maximum for tomorrow will be four: Liz, Arkady, you and ruthi. But my skirt will be the shortest!

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

Since mine is black velvet and nearly ankle length, shorter than it isn't much of a challenge. ;) (It looks fabulous with the corset if I do say so myself, though.)

[ickle-yuki.livejournal.com]

One of these days I'll have to venture down to London again for B-Movie...

Oh and Paul has a job interview with TransCo on Tuesday, I really hope he gets it, not least of which the 4-6k increase in pay would help, let alone getting benefits such as sickness cover etc (he is working as a contractor atm).

[siani-hedgehog.livejournal.com]

what's the dishwasher doing? have you had a good poke about for bits of food in the trap, and possibly tried suctioning out the foody water that sits in it?