Helpful Flynn

I just love a good hard drive crash, don’t you? OK, it didn’t exactly crash, but the computer was blue-screening and dumping its core regularly and if I had let it go on much longer, I would not have been able to retrieve my data.

It all started last summer when a certain portly feline (Helpful Flynn) decided to sit on my keyboard. I don’t know whether it was a specific key combo or a random cosmic particle that entered the hard drive just at that particular time, but just as Flynn sat his butt down, the screen flickered and the wonderful Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) appeared.

I thought it might be a one-off deal, but it recurred regularly over the course of the fall months. A Google search of the error message indicated that the hard drive might be going south. So, like a prudent computer user, I didn’t do anything about it. Until now, that is. Fortunately, the hard drive was a trouper. It limped along until I finally had enough time to deal with it, which meant this week during my vacation.

In case you need to install a new hard drive in your computer anytime soon, I thought I would give you a rundown of what I did.

Supplies

* new hard drive
* screwdrivers and nutdrivers
* a cold beverage
* alcohol of your choice
* a vacuum cleaner
* operating system installation disks
* software installation disks

Steps

NOTE: Back up your entire hard drive onto an external hard drive before performing this steps. You should allow at least one complete evening for this task, because it takes FOREVER to back up 100 GB of data.

1. Lock all the cats out of the room. Even though everything should be unpowered and unplugged before you start working on the computer, you don’t want anymore cat hair than there already is inside your computer. You don’t want to take the chance of a spark using a whisker to jump a trace and blowing out the whole motherboard.

2. Pull out the computer from under your desk.

3. Cough up a storm from all the dust and dirt under and in your computer

4. Vacuum under your desk.

5. Open the computer case. Sometimes this requires a hammer and a screwdriver. (Note to self: Add hammer to Supplies list.)

6. Note all the dust and pet hair that flies out of your computer.

7. Stop to rest and take a sip from your cold beverage.

8. Open the bottle of alcohol pour some into your beverage.

9. Take another sip from your cold beverage.

10. Grab vacuum again and suck up all the dust and hair from your computer. Don’t touch anything with the metal end of the vacuum hose. You don’t want static electricity anywhere near your parts. Computer parts.

11. Take another sip from your cold beverage to clear the dust from your throat.

12. Herd curious cats out of the room again. They came in after you opened the door to go get the vacuum and forgot to close it again.

13. Grab your screwdriver and unscrew the rails that hold the hard drive in place.

14. Figure out that on this computer, you don’t need to unscrew the rails. All you have to do is press on two tabs and the hard drive pops right out.

15. Screw the rails back in place.

16. Put the old hard drive in the secondary hard drive location.

17. Pop out a pair of spare rails conveniently located inside the computer case and screw them onto the new hard drive.

18. Unscrew the rails and rescrew them onto the new hard drive in the correct orientation.

19. Pop the new hard drive into the primary hard drive location.

20. Connect all the hard drive and power supply cables.

21. Close the computer case.

22. Connect the monitor, keyboard, and mouse cables. Don’t connect anything else until you know things are working properly.

23. Say a prayer to St. Isidore of Seville, the patron saint of computers.

24. Turn on the computer and pop in the operating system CD.

25. Take a sip from your lukewarm beverage to celebrate after the new computer drive is recognized and formats correctly.

26. Clean your desk, clip your nails, and add ice to your beverage as the operating system installs.

27. Rejoice when everything appears to be working normally.

28. Become concerned that the old hard drive is not recognized.

29. Consult the manual that came with the new hard drive. Rats. Forgot to set the BIOS to recognize the new/old hard drive.

30. Restart the computer and try to read the screen that flashes by in a nanosecond that indicates which F key to press to enter the BIOS.

31. Repeat Step 30 five times.

32. What the hell. Just press every damned F key you can think of to enter the damned BIOS.

33. Finally. Turn on the setting that allows the computer to see the new/old hard drive.

34. Exit BIOS and boot into your OS.

35. Discover that you enabled the wrong thing.

36. Repeat Step 32 to enter the BIOS.

37. Enable the correct thing.

38. Repeat Step 34.

39. Hooray! The computer sees both hard drives! Take a sip from your beverage (now cold again) to celebrate.

40. Install virus protection software before it’s too late.

41. Drink the rest of your beverage while installing all the damned operating system updates.

42. Connect all the peripherals and shove the computer back under your desk.

43. Copy all data from the old hard drive to the new hard drive.

44. Go to bed because it is now 2 a.m.

45. Get up the next morning, grab some hot coffee, and start installing your software, as follows:

1. Install software
2. Enter 100-character license number.
3. Activate over the Internet.
4. Get put on hold when you call the software company’s tech suppport when activation doesn’t work.
5. Tell them that you just installed a new hard drive and need them to reset activation.
6. Repeat everything five times because you don’t understand them and they don’t understand you because each of you is speaking a different language — English.
7. Finally get new activation for software.
8. Warm up your coffee and add a little alcohol to it.
9. Repeat Software Installation Steps 1-8 as needed until all software is reinstalled.

46. Go to bed, exhausted from the two-day ordeal.