In 2006 I suffered the worst I could ever imagine. Not only did my Mac's hard drive die but also my backup drive toasted itself not but two days later. Data-wise I had a fair amount of stuff backed up to CD. But it was the loss of the computer itself that bankrupted my soul.
I was living back home in CA with my parents. I had given up in NYC and returned crushed to live with them. Philadelphia and any number of things weren't even in my head yet. It was ... it was just that last straw.
I'll spare the reiteration of that story for some other time and just skip forward a bit. The pertinent detail is that a friend donated a laptop to me. This laptop was... possessed, however. Among a number of problems it had, it liked to spontaneously purge it's OS.
I got *VERY* used to reinstalling Windows over the next couple years.
My desk today, July 14th.
Eventually I took some time and resurrected my old Mac. In the end, all it really needed was a new hard drive. A hundred dollars later and I had it running again. It was at this point, however, that I really began to discover just what I *had* lost.
ProTools. I'd bought my Mbox in 2000 just as OS X was about to appear and revolutionize Apple for the first time. At some point after that, I got the upgrade from ProTools 5.x to 6.0. However, in a move completely unlike me, I LOST THE SERIAL NUMBER. I don't know how. Nor do I know when. But... I discovered it was gone.
On my unreliable Windows machine, I'd started using Sonar. And, since I was working at Sam Ash, I used my employee benefits and earned myself a free copy of Live. I decided to install *that* on my Mac. (I may have installed it on the PC first... but... irrelevant.)
I wasn't terribly active writing-wise at the time. I did, however, start to take part in the RPM challenge of '09.
I didn't finish. Just a few months earlier - December of '08 - the guy I had been seeing moved back to Austin. That ended what was really only my second relationship ever. The following weeks had been a bit of a roller coaster and, since his birthday was at the end of February, I needed to get some stuff out of my head and heart.
P.S. it's a horrible song. I'll share it but I'll save that for later.
Regardless, aside from one (questionable) song and some interesting beginnings, what I learned from the challenge was just how unusable my Mac had become. It was just too under-powered to really act as any sort of production environment. I'd still fire it up from time to time. But, frankly, it had little place in my life anymore except for sentimentality.
So when the hard drive started to die _AGAIN_...
Or... at least I thought it was dying. I think... I don't remember now.
What I do know is that yet another year later or so the PC laptop finally hit its end. This time it was *NOT* a hard drive failure, thankfully. Another friend gifted me another computer - a desktop this time.
I bought a 2.5" hard drive enclosure and transferred the laptop's data to the new desktop. I then formatted the 2.5" drive and popped it in to the Mac - placing the Mac's now-former harddrive in to the enclosure. Voila! New life again! This time I set up the Mac as a dual boot - Mac OS and Linux (Mint PPC). Figured I'd use it as a netbook of sorts.
Forward another year and a half to today. I decided that, since I'm cleaning and packing, I'd peek back at that drive. After some fumbling around with connections and startup drive conflicts, I realize: there's still the data from that RPM challenge!!
So here's what's been making this fun. The data on the now-external drive conflicts with the Mac OS side - I'm guessing it's the fact that it's still flagged as a start-up drive. So... I can only access it on the Linux side.
Fine.
However, as it's an old Mac, all I have are USB 1.x ports. ONE. POINT. SOMETHING. USB. ughforeverslow... The PC (desktop) has USB 2 but won't read the drive since it's Mac formatted.
UGH.
So... I have to copy the files on to the Linux partition. I then need to chown the data so I can access it. THEN I have to copy it over to the desktop.
And apparently I need to babysit the final transfer as some files are corrupted or... just not transferring politely.
WHEEEE! The things I do to myself. LOL.
