Always something....

So I bought a new hard drive at Best Buy today. The external 500GB Western Digital drive was $120, and the internal was $165. I would've preferred an internal, but I'll take whatever. I'm not too picky.

So I'm backing up my data onto it, and my PC just decides to power off. All this time I've been running with 5 hard drives in that machine, and while I'm copying the data to this USB drive (which has its own power supply) my PSU has decided that it cannot handle more than 2 IDE drives at a time. It will just power itself back off if there are more than that plugged in. This posed quite the problem, because 3/5 of the drives are "dynamic" which means they act as one drive. Therefore to read my data, I need all of them to be functional.

Soooo.. I found an old Packard Bell PC with an AT power supply in it. This is the old kind that doesn't require that it be hooked to a motherboard to actually power up. I unplugged the 250GB drive that isn't a dynamic drive and isn't a boot drive. I plugged in the 20GB boot drive, and 1/3 of the dynamic drive (this one in particular was a 100GB). I plugged in the remaining two drives to the AT power supply unit and powered it on. Then I powered back on my PC and viola! It's ALLIIIIIVVVEEEE!!!!

I've got crap everywhere in here. At least the data's not gone though. The power supply is probably just on its way out, which is kind of upsetting because I've only had it around a year and a half. And yes, it was actually connected to a UPS when all of this occurred.