Kuma Bear Says, "It's Too Hot!"

Lisa left me a message last night -- it's almost impossible for me to answer my mobile phone before it rolls away to voicemail unless the phone is in my hand -- with her current status. She went to Las Vegas and spent some of the day there yesterday (taking the opportunity to spend time in air-conditioned spaces), and was heading south and east to Arizona, where she would pick a place to stop for the night.

( Unwanted adventures of the Small Orange Pickup )

Lisa reports that Kuma Bear is complaining of the heat and would rather be by a cool mountain stream playing Salmon Keno. No, she doesn't know exactly what that is, either.

Could It Be the Hard Drives After All?

I'm still banging my head against the wall with this darn hard drive/computer problem. It's gotten to where I'm scared to ever turn off the computer, lest the drive refuse to boot again on the next go-around. For a while, I was nearly convinced that it must be the motherboard/controller on the main computer, but the latest experiment now has me confused.

( Neep, Neep, Neep, Neep )

The current plan -- because I pretty much need to have at least one working laptop PC with me at Westercon -- is to make PC2 the working machine for now, and to have it booting from its own hard drive. I don't think PC2's drives have been contaminated with system files from PC1. I've also not put either of PC2's drives (primary and backup) into the suspect PC1 chassis. When I have time -- maybe next week after I get back from Tempe -- I will try doing a bare-metal installation of WinXP on one of the 250GB drives installed in PC1 and see whether it holds up.

Having five hard drives to keep two laptops running is not the happiest state of affairs. And there's still a higher chance than I like that I may end up completely offline while in Arizona, if whatever is troubling the trio of 250GB drives/PC1 starts showing up on the pair of 160GB drives/PC2. OTOH, neither of the 160GB drives has done a "will not boot" on me, so fingers crossed.

Early Bird Gets the /W/a/r/m Hot

Lisa made far better time on this drive than she expected, with the result being that she's arrived a day early. After talking to the hotel's front desk, which then called and talked to me, they're going to let her check in to our room tonight (they said they'd do it at the same rate as the rest of the stay; fingers crossed that this actually happens) and I could deal with the physical credit card when I arrive tomorrow morning. I'm sure Lisa will appreciate getting into an air-conditioned room and getting a bath after four days on the road in the pickup.