Among all hardware, the thing one least wants to see break down is undoubtedly the hard drive—especially a hard drive on which one has already installed all sorts of software and drivers, saved countless files, materials, music, and photos, and made no backup whatsoever. One simply does not want it to fail, no matter what… and yet… and yet…
Within the warranty period, anything else can break; at worst, you just get it replaced. Other hardware is usually first repaired if possible, and only if it cannot be fixed do they give you a new one. Only hard drives do not really have a “warranty” so much as a “replacement guarantee,” because repairing a hard drive is often more trouble than buying a new one…
The new computer was bought two or three months ago, before the graduate students started school. Its configuration was quite lavish, and the hard drive was a 1 TB one. It was at the same Pacific store where I bought my computer four years ago. Looking back, it feels almost like a cycle—four years ago, that machine also had its hard drive fail after only a few months, and I don’t know whose rp was the problem after all…
Last time, the hard drive failed in a heroic death; I even heard a creaking sound when it gave its life. This time, though, it failed without any warning at all. It would not boot, but by the sound of it everything was perfectly normal.
So I took it to the computer market, and when they had a look, they said there was nothing wrong with anything else—it was just that the boot data had been lost. A problem like that should have been the easiest thing to handle; as long as the boot data was restored, everything inside would come back intact without a scratch. However, according to them, this hard drive was too new (the interface really was different—serial?); the repair technology simply had not kept up. They said that fixing it now would be rather troublesome, and might cost several thousand yuan, but if I waited another half a year or so until the repair technology caught up, it would probably only take under three hundred yuan to solve. What else could I do then… wait…
So, I bought another hard drive—exactly the same one… to challenge my rp a bit… I don’t believe in that stuff… After a few hours of tinkering, I finally managed to recover it more or less.
Since the previous computer had also been newly assembled, there actually wasn’t much lost—mainly articles from the past month. Of course, anything posted on the blog doesn’t count as lost, but several unfinished articles disappeared, and there’s nothing to be done about that.
Perhaps this is also a good thing, letting me adjust my mood and reorganize the rhythm of my life, just like that month-and-a-half-long interruption of the hot-water supply…
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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