The Zoo over Ambuscade Street

My CD burner...is not working. It reads discs just fine, but blank CDs? No good. The built-in burning that Windows XP has that used to work so well is completely not working - no CD-burning drive detected, despite the fact that it shows up as a CD-burner in my drive listing.

Any suggestions? Software, settings, what-have-you? I really, really, really need to get things backed up, so I can replace my failing system drive, but I can't do that without a working burner, and I have, at the moment, exhausted my limited knowledge of how to make a CD burner work when it doesn't want to.

Thomas and Stacey came over yesterday, with Ryan eventually showing up as well. We went to lunch, I made cookies, and then we got to work on the Important Tast of Making Danielle's Computer Work Right. Took a while.

Problems from the very start - found out I had neglected to pick up a video card. Whoops. And my processer didn't come with a heatsink, so we needed one of those as well. We got the mobo and some of the innards into the case and headed out to pick up said video card. Ryan picked up a heatsink from his house, and we returned to continue. Problems mounted. The case I have is Very Small, and things that Should Not Touch were touching - CD Drives hitting the heatsink, HDD touching the video card, etc. Not cool.

Stacey and I headed back out to pick up a present for Thomas' sister. On our way back we get a phone call - my power supply is insufficient to run aforementioned video card. Nice. We all pile back into Stacey's car and go back to Circuit City. Once there we realize that we neglected to measure the power supply in my case - important, because things are so crammed in there. Whoops!

Notice $50 power supply. Notice spiffy $65 case with power supply right under it. Buy new case. Go out to dinner.

It didn't take us much longer after that to get everything back together - we had to play with jumper settings to get everything actually turning on, and Thomas had set both opical drives as Master which led to some interesting BIOS fun, but it was more-or-less uneventful. Confirmed that nasty clicking noise wasn't fan and was, in fact, system HDD. Not good.

So, this morning I delete everything I can off said system drive, back up as much data as I can onto it, and pull the computer apart to switch the drives. Formatted the 30GM former data-drive and made it the new system drive. Copied most of the data off the defective drive onto it.

Tomorrow I'm going to pick up the 80GB drive that Best Buy has on sale, copy the data from the system drive onto it, swap it out with the defective drive again, copy the remaining data onto my system drive, swap the new 80GB data drive back in, put the rest of the data onto it, and defrag my poor system drive to make it happier. THEN I can reinstall Morrowind to make Erik happy. Very happy.

On a positive note, the CD burner seems to be functioning again. Sorry, Izzy - I didn't find a way to make it work again, but I think my defective drive might be partially to blame for that.

I ended up losing about 10GB of data - hopefully, nothing that I can't redownload, although it may take a while. I'll start that up once I get the new data drive in tomorrow.

This poor computer - a "simple upgrade" ended up costing me $155 more than anticipated, and left me with a computer that has almost no parts in common with the original - the DVD drive, one fan, the floppy, network card, and one stick of memory are the only things from the original. And the DVD drive/memory are probably going to go back in the old one so I can have another computer to do...something with. I'm not sure what, yet.

Anyway - after tomorrow, my computer should be fully fixed and I shouldn't have to worry about it for quite a while. Yay! There was also work-fun in the midst of this - I'll tell that saga once I find out the end of it tonight.

[edit] Make that the CD burner is not working correctly, still. Sigh - I'm going to work on it for another hour before I crash. Don't wanna go to work tomorrow...

Letting go is hard. Putting it off for far too long doesn't make it any easier. I feel like I failed somewhere, even though it's not my fault, even though there's nothing I could have done.

Goodbye StarStorm Weyr. It's been a good eight years, and all of you have taught me so much. I'll miss you.