A Typical Fall Day In Texas . . .
Today is going to be one of those typical Fall days in Texas, what with running the AC’s this morning and the heaters tonight.
It was sunny and 75° today, but it’s going down to 41 tonight. And only up to 57° tomorrow and 38 tomorrow night. Of course it could be a lot worse like up north of here where the roads are closed due to high winds and heavy snow.
Today was just a nice stay-at-home day for us, computing, napping, TV’ing, reading, etc. Couldn’t be much nicer.
My project for today was to replace the HD in our ASUS X53E laptop, circa 2012. I’m starting to get errors from the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) firmware system built into the HD itself. Every time I boot up it gives me a DOS warning message that the HD needs to be replaced ASAP. But since I’m not seeing any ‘actual’ errors during operation, I’m thinking that the drive is probably sensing more and more intermittent read/write errors.
This happens when the HD tries to read some data from the drive and gets an error the first few times before finally reading the data correctly. Or the same thing when it tries to write some data to the drive.
So in preparation for this changeout, a couple of days ago I made a complete System Image of the laptop’s HD onto my 2TB WD external drive.Then all I had to do today was to find the replacement 500GB drive I had ordered for another project a while back but never used.
But when I found that, I realized I had another problem. I didn’t have a copy of the System Repair DVD here at home that I need to reinstall the System Image. So I’ll bring one home from my client’s tomorrow.
The neat thing about a System Image is that it’s a snapshot of the drive, so when I install the image to a new drive, it starts up exactly like it was before. There’s no reinstalling the OS, programs, data, etc. Just copy and go.
Or at least I will tomorrow.
Speaking of tomorrow, NASA got another Mars Lander touching down around 2pm CT tomorrow afternoon. After it lands (a toss-up since only about 50% of past Mars landers have been sucessfull), it will deploy a seisometer and a probe that will drill about 3 meters into the interior of the planet and then spend the next two years checking temps and monitoring for Marsquakes.
You can check out the landing on either NASA TV or streaming at Space.com.
Thought for the Day:
“A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.” – John Barrymore
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