I left work yesterday afternoon and headed to Fry’s in north Austin via Hwy 1431. Traffic was a pain in the ass once I got to northwest Austin and 1431 is a road that’s best driven in a low profile sports car. Not a early-90s mini truck with no power steering.
I was on a mission to buy supplies in which to fabricate my own bus-powered external hard drive. Fry’s has clunky and ugly bus-powered enclosures and their 2.5″ hard drives are more expensive than I expected for Fry’s. So I held off on making any type of external storage purchase. Since I was there, I had to look around. I didn’t find anything that struck my fancy nor that I thought I had to have so I left.
I stopped in at the dollar store next to Fry’s. I needed some empty spray bottles for household and auto cleaning products. I picked up three of them. I walked to the register to find that there was a $7 minimum on purchases made with a debit card. I had to find four more items. Bandaids. Twizzlers. Air freshener. Shaving cream.
My debit card didn’t work. Our bank sent us new debit cards and I activated both of them. Apparently I have to have the PIN set. Wouldn’t you think your PIN would carry over?
So my Friday evening was a total dry run and waste of time.
I went home and pulled out my old external drive so I could backup the iBook. The iBook wouldn’t recognize the drive. Ugggghhhh! I plugged said drive into Elise’s laptop. Worked great. I messed around with this drive for at least an hour. I still couldn’t get it to mount on the iBook. I’d walk away and try again occassionally. It finally mounted and I started a backup.
Elise came home and I exlained my recent woes. I told I really didn’t want to, but it was looking like I was going to have to invest in quality, manufacturer-built external hard drive. She understood and agreed that this would be a worthy investment as I have, in the past, lost some important documents, website designs, photos, music, etc.
I left the iBook to back itself up and went to bed. I woke up this morning excited thinking I would find my external drive sitting on the kitchen table, where I left the night prior, with all of the iBook data backed up. Nope. It didn’t complete the backup. After a quick investigation I realized that the drive was full. So I started deleting older backups.
Elise woke up and needed to check her e-mail. I was kind of using her computer as well as the iBook. I handed over her laptop and she tried to open Firefox. “I can’t get online. Fix it!” So she handed over her laptop. I set her computer down in front of me and in doing so I accidentally bent the USB cable just perfectly so that it hit the power button on the external hard drive and turned it off.
Uggghhhh!
I started it up again and once again, the iBook can’t recognize it. I plugged it into Elise’s laptop and it’s recognized. Now I’m deleting 100 GBs of old data using Elise’s computer to see it will then be mountable on the iBook.