We have a guest arriving soon-ish to Chez Soques. Tidy-minded as we are, over Thursday night’s dinner we reminded ourselves to make the guest room ready…
which I internalized as: finish out the half-projects that got tucked in there.
Objects standing in for the projects in play:
boxes of books that might go into our church’s library;
boxes of books that absolutely should be freed for other destinies;
a loaned back-massager tucked in our beachy recliner;
the computer we retired last June.
I’m tackling that last right now.
Because I have a Computer Transfer Protocol™, I don’t simply boot up the new one and promptly trash the old one. One, computers are made using all sorts of toxic bits, so if one can find something more responsible than the landfill, that’s helpful. Two, I have scars from customers (ok, “users”) whose new machines urped soon after transfer, and hanging on to their former systems (that is, hard drives, and so data) kept all of us from shredding our clothes in grief. Three, we Chez Soques have decades of accumulated financial data on that disk, and while I think the risk is about 0.002% that someone would go to the trouble of looking for it there, I still don’t want to take the risk.
Hence ARTHUR waiting in the guest room since June to be disk-wiped and relocated.
My Sweetie’s off to do right by our congregation, helping with some hosting we’re doing, and I have a quiet pajama morning… time to wipe.
I delight in having a “head switcher,” so that without unplugging anything I already have a set of cables ready to connect my monitor, keyboard, and mouse to ARTHUR.
I find my DBAN autonuke disk. If you don’t want anyone to excavate data from a computer disk, this is an excellent tool. Not as excellent as running a power drill through the drive, but I like having the hope that someone might be able to use said drive after I give it away.
I lug ARTHUR to the office, cable him up, turn him on. A few times. Because getting the monitor/input auto-sensing on both ARTHUR annnd the head-switcher to line up can be fussy… at least how I do it, by madly mashing the switch. ARTHUR gives a “I find no disk error.”
Odd, whatever, I pop in the DBAN cdrom and reboot. And run DBAN.
DBAN doesn’t find a disk, either. Pfbbt! Disk must be loose from the lugging around, and maybe being kicked in the guest room. I’ll open up “the box” (computer case).
[blink, blink] There’s. NO. HARD. DISK. in. the. case.
!!!!
[rocks back on heels] [muses]
Oh yeah. I bought that nifty disk-connector set when I moved the data from ARTHUR to EDWARD. (“Beloved British kings for $1000, Alex.“) During the transfer, I pulled ARTHUR’s hard drive out and hooked it up to EDWARD so I wouldn’t have to keep both boxes underfoot at once.
[stands up, rummages in cupboard, fishes out cardboard box labeled “arthur-disk”]
**
Perhaps it’s just as well I’m amused by the ways my past and present selves don’t converse with each other much.
Or maybe it’s such an easy, reliable friendship that they figure what one knows, the other doesn’t have to keep tabs on.
**
ARTHUR is now 4% of the way through round 1 of data-wiping. He won’t remember a thing by tomorrow.