MP3 Salvage Operation

Submitted: Friday, March 19, 1999 00:31

For those just tuning in, Dagobah arrived at the Louisville compound about 15 hours ago, and has been assemblend and running on and off for nearly 12 hours now...

I am currently in the process of salvaging my most-treasured mp3s from that patheticly unreliable storage medium, the Sparq drive. I immediately narrowed it down to songs I didn't have on CD, and of those, only the ones I like the most.

Low and behold, my home partition filled up a little while ago! That was a big surprise. Not. So, anyway, I've temporarily managed to aid the situation by clearing my Netscape cache, which freed over 180 megs. Who'd have known the little bastard could accumulate that much so quickly? :-)

Since I wasn't planning on storing the bulk of my mp3s on the hard drive when I designed the partitioning scheme, this little problem promises to put a dent in save-everything-clean-later policy. Oh well, it's sure better than having my collection of pirated music lost forever.

So how did this recovery come about? Well, after using some of Bouncing's compressed air to spray the interior of the infernal device, it still wouldn't accept cartridges, so I resorted to the slot machine method: Insert a cartridge, and if it won't mount, take it out and insert it again. If that doesn't work, insert another one, and repeat. I'd estimate I iterated through this process nearly a dozen times for both cartridges until getting them to mount.

Then, when copying files from the Sparq's filesystem, if an i/o error appears, copy the file again. If that fails, repeat the copy, and sometimes it will work. If not, go on to copy another file or two and then come back to the original one. A bit tedious, but so far, it has been successfull.

I think tomorrow I'll try calling Syquest and see if I can (at best) get a refund for the piece of crap and the cartridges, or at least a repair/replacement. Sending packages back and forth through the mail is gonna be a pain since my address changes so constantly. The joys of being a student...