One of my drives finally got stubborn today. My old desktop machine (a circa 1999 blue G3 tower) has three hard drives in it, and one of them has occasionally failed on read attempts over the past few months; today it stuck with the failure long enough for a chain reaction of evil to occur.

When the computer hung, I rebooted and the drive's failure kept the system from coming up, even though it's not the startup disk. I shut down completely, let it sit, and brought it back up again. It took a few minutes, but eventually the system came up, with one drive not mounting. Surprisingly, it was a different drive than I believed was failing. Indeed, the missing drive was the one I could most easily afford to lose. If it's double-plus-dead, that'll be annoying, but not as bad as it could have been.

So I shut down again and open the machine up to begin the trial and error of figuring out which drive is which. First try, I unplug the startup disk instead. Whoops! Booting from the Panther install CD indicates that no hard drives are mounted. Hm. Shut down again, blow some dust around, switch the startup disk in for another drive. By this time it's getting really warm -- the heat index today is supposed to be around 100, and the computer room in our house isn't near many good ventilation sources. So I plug in a box fan and get back to it.

But not ten seconds later I get a familiar whiff of electrical fire. If you've worked in computer maintenance for at least a little while, you probably know this smell. Burning wires, dust, the pungent smell of a vacuum. I switched off the fan, thinking maybe I'd overloaded a power strip, and as I smelled around I couldn't find the source. It seemed to dissipate as soon as I started looking for it. So I ignore it, figuring there's so much dust in the room it's I wonder I'm not smelling burning dust all the damn time, and boot the computer back up. It sounds fine, but there's nothing on the monitor, even though it's got the green signal light. The smell was the monitor popping; I didn't place it because the last time that happened to me I was lucky enough to get a little mushroom cloud of smoke coming out the top.

So know I have to go find a cheap monitor somewhere; I think the drive situation is fine, but I'll have no way of knowing until later. On the plus side, I got a 2.5" drive enclosure in the mail today, to get data off my old, semi-catatonic laptop drive, and it works beautifully.