Drunk Elephant Comics

29 December 11

No Strips For Now. My Computer Is Dying!

Ugh – so I’m back in Omaha for the holidays, and one of the things I always do is run some maintenance on my grandfather’s computer. He has an older MacBook, and he had been complaining that while working on his World War II memoires that his computer had been acting slowly. I ran some basic maintenance tasks and hit some errors that required me to repair his hard drive. I took his laptop home with me to work on, and once I started to work, the disk locked up completely and switched into read-only mode. Which, as I now know from the Genius Bar at the Apple Store means that the hard drive is irrevocably damaged. To make matters worse, my grandfather’s backups were not working at all. He was going to lose everything.

And then somehow it got worse. MY MacBook suddenly stopped working two days ago. I’ve been in a mad panic to try to fix it and somehow pull anything off of my grandfather’s laptop.

I’ve run out of options on my MacBook, having tested the hard drive, checked the logs, cleared caches, reset the SMC, cleared the PRAM, and booted into Safe Mode to check for any rampant background process running amok.

The good news? I was able to rip out my grandfather’s hard drive, attach it to a USB sled/enclosure, mount it and pull all of his data.

The bad news? No new strip this week, but hopefully in the foreseeable future.

Wish me luck!