Turns out there’s a geek speak term in the computer world called “bricked”. I’ve just gotten a crash course in Bricked 101.
The OS, Win Vista 64, in this computer that I had custom built by Dell about 3 years ago, has been somewhat problematic but useable. I’ve been able to run compatibility software to integrate old with new programs and the 5th edition of Western Whiskey Bottles (WWB) was slowly coming back to life after the last computer “issue”.
Thanks to Dell who built this thing and Seagate who built & distributed the defective primary hard drive (a 750gb / #7200-11), with a ticking time bomb in the form of faulty firmware, I'm dead in the water.
We were gone on vacation for well over a week at the first part of May, and returned last Monday (5/21) only to discover that the grenade finally detonated when I attempted to boot up the system. My primary desktop was rendered useless. The bios failed to recognize the startup drive and all we got was a simple error message to the tune of no hard drive recognized. Anyone care to run a Google search of the same and then join in a class action?
Now that I’ve vented, many thanks to the tech dept. at my IT, who were successful in at least getting me back up in a marginal fashion using a spare surplus drive running Windows XP. Turns out that the Seagate Free Agent external backup drive which was supposed to be backing up my files, was also not doing its job. Here’s hoping that the firmware fix that Seagate may or may not perform on their “Barracuda” hard drive in the next who knows how long, will resurrect my data.
As such, the photos, research, data, layouts etc. are gone once again; perhaps for good. If so, kiss the 5th edition of “WWB” good-by. This is the 3rd failure of this Dell computer (and subsequent BS attempted fixes by Dell), with consecutive total loss of unrecoverable data, and there’s no more smoke in my shorts (to quote an old pal up in D’ville).
Time will tell. And as for Dell, well, you can guess where they can go!
