Xeros612

Taking Maes's idea, obviously. (Not really; I had actually thought of recording these old things for listening, cleaning up, digital copy, and possibly sharing for a while now, it's just Maes's recent thread that brought the idea to the front of my mind.)

Essentially, I had in mind an idea to take my father's old 8-tracks and (at least a selection of) the old vinyl records I've gotten from a variety of sources (mostly my grandparents' house) and record the entirety of them digitally for reasons stated in parentheses above. A wrench was thrown into those plans when I was reminded that the Emerson record player I bought at a yardsale a few years back had a warped table (seller left the damn thing out in the sun on a very hot day; smart one, he is) and a possibly damaged needle, the Cariole 8-track player stereo I used to listen to the 8-tracks with apparently burned its motor out (indeed, it just sits and grinds now, and the program change button doesn't even move), and the Realistic "boombox" 8-track player doesn't have a functioning program changer.

Regardless, I decided to go ahead and do some recording anyway. Not really something I'd consider for serious full-album rips; at least not til I have the resources to buy better quality playback equipment. It's at least worth a listen.

A video version of the above introduction. (Any audio abnormalities are the fault of "truncate silence" in Audacity and lazy editing.)

Hard drive failure. Yep.

So I got up this morning at 7AM for lab. I had left my laptop on overnight rendering out an Oblivion video and downloading some youtube files; the same sort of thing I've done millions of times before on the laptop and other computers. So the first thing I do in the morning is open up the laptop lid to see if everything went fine and shut it down for a few hours, but instead of a "your video finished rendering" message, I see something roughly equating "DISK ERROR CHECKSUM 0" on a black screen. (I'll try to confirm later on, though it'd probably be on the twitter [same username as here] because right now the only backup system near my PC is the xbox and there's only twitter/facebook connect available there. As much as consoles try to take over PCs in terms of usability you'd think a web browser would be standard.)

Having only an hour before lab started I could only try rebooting a few times to the same error (including removing and replacing the battery and power cable between boot-ups, just in case that would do anything). After my next class which will end roughly around 12:30 I'm going to try more proper fixing, but I fear even if I get that fixed, I'll end up losing everything on it (DVD-Rs are not good backup formats for large youtube videos and such) and I don't know if it would be safe to continue recording/rendering on the machine even then.

So how's everyone else's week starting?