Not a good time to be Rizwan's Hard Drives

Last week, I received a replacement 74GB 10,000RPM SATA drive, for the same model which hosts my operating systems. Not a big deal, 'cause Western Digital's excellent warranty service sent me a new drive in a couple of days, so I can transfer files and then return the defective one.

Then, on Friday, a problem occurred on my storage drive - the one with all my pictures, music, and development folders. Those of you AOLers familiar with CMSuite for Windows will know what I'm talking about. The cm folder which holds all your compressed libraries (used to reduce the amount of time for building other stuff, like Boxely), was suddenly unable to have any new files downloaded to it or deleted from it. Further inspection revealed that some of the files and folders had become locked, like when you try and delete a file that's open by some application. Nothing worked. Rebooting, Process Explorer to see open handles, MoveFiles - access denied. I even downloaded Knoppix and booted from CD and tried to delete - Access Denied! Yeesh. Time to buy a new HDD, so I went over and bought a shiny new 500GB SATA drive to take over for my 250GB EIDE drive. So long, Maxtor.

I was planning to work this weekend to submit something great for the internal Boxely contest. Hey, when you're buying a house, any cash prize isn't a nice-to-have - it's a goal. I only had about 5 hours to come up with something. Let's see what happens.