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.