More Friday Follow Fun:

Hello Tuesday!  I rather like Tuesday’s, because they’re not Monday and we’re one step closer to Friday.  I know, my mind works in mysterious ways.  It’s also the perfect day to rack up the Random – so let’s get busy, shall we?

So last week I decided to put a bigger hard drive in my laptop, so I could put my existing hard drive in Princess Nagger’s laptop to thwart her lamenting about the fact that her hard drive was completely full.  Like to the brim full,  making her Minecraft and Roblox games crash and not able to do any updates.  That full.

To make my life easier, I decided to utilize a cloning software to clone my hard drive to the new one, then just swap it out and not miss a beat. 

Or so I thought. 

The cloning software did something funky and effed up the boot file on not only the new hard drive, but my original one.  Oh boy.  What does that mean?  Neither drive would boot to windows.  Nada.  Zilch.  Dead in the water.

Cloning gone bad, like the one clone on one of my favorite shows, Orphan Black – the ‘bad’ clone:

She looks pretty bad, doesn’t she?  Here, let’s give you some perception – this is the ‘good’ clone (or she’s the original, we have yet to find out who is actually the original of the multitudes of clones):

She’s a lot more ‘normal’ looking, isn’t she?  So back to the cloning gone bad – I started the whole process Wednesday afternoon – downloading the cloning software, reading all the instructions a zillion times to make sure I didn’t mess it up, then Thursday morning decided it was ‘go time’. 

The cloning itself took just over an hour, so I busied myself with other things – you know, like talking on the phone and purging the piles’o'papers on my desk.  At least something  was accomplished.

Then the moment of truth – removing my original drive and installing the new one – only to boot up to a blank screen with an annoying blinking cursor.  Blink, blink.  Blink, blink.  I shut down my laptop, swapped the drives back to the original, booted up and……… black screen, blinking cursor.  UGH.

I won’t bore you with all the subsequent details, but suffice it to say I was trying every trick in the book to get my laptop to boot up to anything at all (you know, besides in restore mode from the CD).  I lost count how many times I ran the repair software, so I finally did a restore on the new drive (which of course wiped out the clone) and still nothing.  Just blankness and blink, blink….blink, blink.

Since my original drive still wouldn’t boot to save my life, I resigned myself to restoring that one (and wiping out everything on that drive because I was remiss in doing a backup – my last backup was December, and I’ve been a busy girl since then).  Yippee.

And do you know what happened when I restored my hard drive to its original factory settings?  Absolutely nothing.  The boot file was obviously corrupted (and refused to be repaired in repair mode), preventing boot up past the annoying black screen and that ever lovin’ annoying  blinking cursor.  I’m pretty sure my face looked like this:

And there might have been a few uncharacteristic swear words cross my lips.  There were definitely tears of frustration.

To make a long story even longer short, more than 48 hours later I finally figured out how to fix the boot file, got both drives to boot up, and successfully installed the new drive in my laptop.  Missing all the stuff I had on there since December, of course. *Poof!*  All gone.

I have yet to subject my sanity to the turmoil of backing up Princess Nagger’s drive and swapping that one out with my original one.  Heaven forbid I should mess up her hard drive and lose all her saved game statuses.  Wish me luck.

Of course now I’m swimming upstream trying to catch up on everything after being dead in the water for 2-1/2 days, so please bear with me.  Or is that bare with me?  No, silly – I don’t want you to get naked, so it’s obviously the former vs. the latter.

That’s a wrap for this week – not quite random, but I don’t want to overload you with too much in one fell swoop, so I’ll save the other randomness in my mind for later.  Meanwhile, link up and join in the fun, everyone is welcome, random or not. Be sure to visit your fellow randomizers so they don’t feel so lonely.

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Keeping the random alive – feel free to snag a badge and play along – one for my wino friends:

And one for my non-wino friends:

I’m also linking up with two stellar ladies, Shawn and Impulsive, the lovely hosts of Talk To Us Tuesday. There are no rules so link away.

More Tuesday hops – if you’re stopping by here from there, please do me a favor and follow via LinkyFollowers – since I was robbed of my GFC followers when the cads at Goggle decided to boycott non-Blogger blogs. The Tuesday hops seems to have diminished – if you have one let me know and I’ll add you here, too!

Tagged as: clones, computer trouble, dead in the water, dead laptop, new hard drive, Random Tuesday Thoughts Rebel, roblox, Talk To Us Tuesday, Tuesday Hops

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