NAS crash!!!
Yesterday was Tuesday the 13th. For most of the world, Friday the 13th is the traditional bad luck day.
But for the majority of Spanish-speaking people, Tuesday the 13th is the ominous one.
The fear of the number 13th has a scientific name: “triskaidekaphobia”.The fear of the Friday the 13th is called “paraskevidekatriaphobia”.
Apparently, its origins lay in the nordic myths, when there was dinner at the Valhalla (nordic people’s Olympus, only more so) with 12 invites, A 13th person appeared uninvited, it was Loki, who created a situation where one of the gods killed another, an act that caused the Earth to go dark. Therefore the 13 started its bad reputation.
Jesus was supposedly crucified on a Friday and in the last supper there were 13 attendants, 12 apostles, and Jesus himself. After the last supper, Judas Iscariot betrays him for 30 silver denarii.
The combination of those, and other less known myths, seems to be a plausible explanation of the fear of Friday the 13th. The fear of Tuesday the 13th started in Greece, Tuesday in Spanish is Martes, and that is related both to Marte (the Roman god of war) and Ares (the Greek god of war).
The fall of Constantinople, an event that marked the end of the Middle Age and the end of the last remnant of the Roman Empire, took place on Tuesday, April 13, 1204.
Whatever the case, it was Tuesday the 13th.
And these following unfortunate events happened down here:
First, the surge of Covid19 cases in the last weeks forced the government to impose a strict quarantine with a curfew starting at 20:00 till 6:00. Schools and universities return to virtual, remote mode and all activity in restaurants, bars, coffee stores, and shopping malls is suspended.
Remote working is mandatory for non-essential workers and a circulation permit has to be obtained to move around the city.So, we are back to where we started a year ago. Bed occupation in hospitals is between 90 and 95 %.
And my neurologist told me not to visit him until August.
On a personal level, I’m now stuck in the loaned apartment in Vicente Lopez, a fact that I can’t complain about since the view from the main balcony is amazing, but I don’t know when I’ll be able to meet with my kids, who are living in the Palermo apartment with my ex.
Secondly, the same Tuesday about noon, one of my data backup drives (a 2Tb Seagate NAS drive) started to make those hateful sounds that inform the presence of bad sectors in the HD plates.
I have my work documents in Onedrive, my photos stored in Google Drive and the Adobe cloud, so I avoided dramatic data losses. But there a few things that I might have been lost, mainly some Virtual Machines that will require some work to be rebuilt.
And in third place, on the same Tuesday, after the disk crash, I got a replacement SSD. And I spent the whole afternoon and evening cloning the laptop’s original SSD, (which was a suspect cause of the Seagate drive corruption) with another SSD. The new SSD arrived without the locking M2x3 screw, which forced me to wander from one computer shop to another (well from one to the other, there are only two of them at walking distance) to get one.
Come on Western Digital!!! the SSD was not cheap so, how much do you actually save by not including a measly M2x3 screw in your blister package???!!! 5 cents maybe?
After finding a generous man in the second store, who gave me the screw for free, I started cloning the old SSD into the new one, only to discover that due to the security policies of both Dell and MS. my old SSD was encrypted with Bitlocker encryption, a fact that made the cloning procedure worthless.
I had to google quite a bit to found a way to perform the cloning, which involved learning about Bitlocker encryption, MS’s VSS technology, and the use of a really good cloning software available for free for personal use called Macrium Reflect.
I can’t be more thankful with the guys at Macrium Software (https://www.macrium.com/), they have a winner with that product.
But in order to perform the cloning, I had first to unencrypt the old SSD and disable Bitlocker, a process that took an hour and a half, at midnight.
Today I woke up early, performed some command-line tasks, and now my laptop’s happily running from the new SSD. I’m leaving the old SSD as a scratch disk for Virtual Machines and the ever-growing Photoshop virtual disk.
So, this month Tuesday the 13th was indeed a day of omen. In any case, now my laptop is back online, my data is once again available, and is Thursday the 15th.