I’m Under Stress

Thursday, April 21, 2011

No wonder my blood pressure is high.

Apart from wandering the face of this planet, I have auxiliary matters of contention.

This morning I rose at 4 a.m. (not unusual for me), rebooted the computer and walked away.

The first re-boot of the day triggers all sorts of useful tasks, including flushing the browser cache, initiating a run of The Prospector to scour yesterday’s CNW press releases , fires up my weight-monitoring spreadsheet and a host of other things. While it is doing that I wander into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee and cater to the cat’s bowls.

Of course, the very first thing the reboot does is to load TrueCrypt and decrypt the encrypted hard drive which holds all the data.

Except this morning it didn’t.

TrueCrypt Just Hung There.

20 minutes had passed before I noticed this, so I rebooted; a little glitch is all; an experiment by the cosmos.

The machine wouldn’t reboot, so I did the old lean-on-the-power-button trick to force a shut-down and then powered up again for a clean reboot of the day.

Nada.

TrueCrypt Just Hung There.

Without a decrypted hard drive all I have is an encrypted hard drive.

Shut-down, Power-on.

TrueCrypt Just Hung There.

Shut-down, Power-on. Panic.

Well! To make a short story long (there follows 2,000 words of technical gibberish) it turned out to be a hang caused by a blank ready-to-burn-songs CD that I’d popped in the DVD burner yesterday and never got around to burning.

Puts all the device numbers out of whack.

Confuses TrueCrypt.

Which doesn’t tell me “Hey! You’ve got an extra drive here”; it just sulks.

While my panic sets in.

My last job each evening is to backup all computers to twin external drives, so on paper we’re alright. Except I wasn’t looking forward to reloading some 60 GB of stuff from an external drive.

That would put a crimp in my morning.

Oh well, let’s get on with the day. 60 minutes down the tubes …

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