lowquality.net

So I plugged in my removable drive this morning and it kept clicking clicking clicking clicking and never gave me so much as an error on my screen. This is usually a bad sign for hard drives but I have observed some weird NTFS permissions issues that occur when I move this drive between my work Windows XP machine and my home Linux box. These issues get particularly noticeable if I happen to delete any of the hidden files Windows writes to the drive (System Volume Information folder for instance). It continues to work, but occasionally it goes into a clicking fit because it can’t write something in the background. Anyway, I’ve noticed that these issues have stopped since the last reformatting of the drive and that turning off Windows’ indexing service caused this issue to go away completely. I thought I was ok… until today.

Even though this at first seemed like the familiar NTFS error at first, it really seemed like I just had a dead hard drive now. Click click click click click. Not usually a good sign. Desperately, I suppose, I unplugged and replugged the USB cable to no avail.. click click click click.

Not expecting it to do any good I thought I’d reseat the USB cable on the PC side. I grabbed the end of the cable and, expecting it to curve upwards towards to port replicator of my laptop, it funneled down through the rat’s nest of cables to the power strip behind the credenza. I plugged my hard drive into my phone charger.

USB is far too universal.