Only One More Hurdle

At 8:00 am yesterday I had my store's main computer on Dale's workbench and he was pulling the hard drive. After some research he determined the size of replacement drive that would still be recognized by the BIOS, hooked the old and new drives up, and we began the arduous task of copying the data from my old 10MB (yes, that's MB) to a new 20MB hard drive. Dale and I settled down for a chat.

In these days of thumb drives and micro SD cards, people
forget how far and fast we've come. This ad is no joke.
Ten MB was high-capacity in the 1990's. 

We talked - about so many things - most not computer related. We got into his early days of building computers, his education, his travels. We touched on his family and then settled in for a long examination of comparative religions, human migration and linguistic patterns, and mythological similarities around the world. By this time is was 3-1/2 hours later and only 17% of the drive had been successfully copied over. I left, asking him to keep in touch and let me know how things were progressing.

Among the history we discussed, was the rise and rule
of Nimrod, aka Asher, the god-king of Babylon. It was
really fun to talk comparative religions with
someone who has actually done some serious
research in the topic. 

Meanwhile my staff was growling. It wasn't fun for them to have to hand-write each and every sale. I had visions of their possibly having to do so today as well, but Dale phoned at 5:30 pm with an update - we were up to 67% transfer. Finally, close to 9:00 pm, Dale phoned once more. We got the transfer accomplished, more than 12 hours after beginning it. He put the new hard drive into my computer and he said it booted up correctly.

I have a feeling there was a lot of red on my
hard drive because the "Ghost" program was
finding error after error. Dale will run a quick Scan
Disc of the new drive this morning to make sure
everything is OK before I pick the system up from him. 

I still don't know how badly my inventory program was corrupted - obviously there were a LOT of problems with that old drive. But I'll be at Dale's today at 8:00 am to pick my computer up and bring it back to the shop. So the final hurdle looms ahead. When I have it back in its home, (1) will it boot up and load my inventory program properly, and (2) will my slave computer that runs my cash register recognize it and talk to it appropriately?

Just one more day of crossing fingers. If my computers can
still talk to each other, I'll be back in business once again. 

One more day of crossing fingers, but one big hurdle overcome, and at least I'll be in air conditioning today. Yesterday was extremely hot and very humid. I was just dripping for most of the day. Here's hoping your Thursday goes well, and thanks for all of the positive thoughts. Please keep them going for one more day! *hugs* to all.