Ranting to /dev/null

iPod and crashes

I got an iPod last week. A 20GB model. I've almost filled it, but I'm leaving a little room for some albums I have yet to rip. That's the good news. The bad news is that my file server crashed and burned a while back. I only found out about it on Saturday because I wanted access to my music for the iPod. So I ganked the drives from the server and installed them in my main box. Things failed to work great. The new drives worked, but in doing so they somehow managed to scramble the partition table on another one of my drives. All the data is there, but I can't get to it just now. It had some pretty valuable data on it too - valuable to me anyway - so that's pretty annoying. I'm messing around with data recovery software right now. I'll probably end up salvaging most of it on other drives, reformating the wonky one, and putting it all back. Bleh. Then, to make matters even more fun, I plugged in a second optical device so I could rip some DVDs. Not a good idea. My IDE expansion card has been flaky for a while, and adding these three devices drove it over the edge. Most of the time my computer will completely hang after about a minute of uptime. At least I hope it's that. Because if it isn't, it means that 5 hard drives, a Zip drive, a DVD and a CD-RW is too much power consumption on top of my CPU and whatnot. And that's bad because they don't make consumer-grade PSU's that run more that the 550w I've already got. I'm hoping I can just trade out the PCI/IDE card and things will be happy. Or maybe I'll just get a clamshell and make a drive or two external. That would work too.

At least I got my iPod stocked before the crap hit the fan...