A Day of Drain Circling

There comes a time in every tech's life when they sit down, lean back, and kick the ever living crap out of the bottom of their desk. Today was one such day. It all started with a visit from our warranty repair company. They routinely deliver parts for broken computers days after they promised to, and do so with a smile.

The part was a laptop hard drive. So I needed to get the user's data off the hard drive. Each method I tried to get her data off ended up failing and I quickly decided that the world was against me today.

First, let me explain that I'm not simply attempting to remove her data, because that would have been easy, but I was trying to create an image of her machine, meaning that after the hard drive was replaced, I could restore this image, and the user would not know the difference. Every icon would be exactly where she left it. Every bookmark, background, annoying-ass paperclip guy, and every word she added to her dictionary in Word would be right where she left it. It's easier for the user and for us to do this, because otherwise they ask us the same questions about configuring their machine that they asked the last time they got a new computer. You cannot simply boot up Windows when you're making an image, because when Windows is running, certain files are in use and can't be copied, the swap file is in use and shouldn't be copied, and several other issues that prevent a good image of the machine to be made.

So, trying to boot this machine I pull out my handy-dandy floppy disk and low and behold, there is no floppy. So I go ask the user where her floppy drive is and she claims she never got it.......right. So I decide to pull out the laptop hard drive and hook it to an adapter that will allow it to inside a normal desktop unit. After half an hour of monologue that would make the most ill-tempered sailor blush, I determined that the adapter was broken.

So at this point I can already feel the day swirling around and around.

Now I try to take that floppy disk and burn it to CD so I can boot from a CD and get the sytem to do what I need it to. The software to do it on my machine is completely fouled up, so I go to my coworker's machine. It's not loaded, so I find the disk and we load it. It's keyed for a specific CD-burner, and it's not the one she has. We dig, and dig, and finally find the right version and install it. We get the CD burned. I put it in the laptop, boot up, it's loading, the imaging software come up and......the $*#%in machine is locked up! Reboot, the same!

*Flush*

There goes another day in the life of an IT guy.