The year to date, in hardware failures:
- January: The Intrepid's battery drops stone dead, 13 months old. One of babylon5's hard disks and its internal Zip drive fail. The Zip drive screws up the bus enough to make it look like the CDROM drive has failed too, but that turns out to be a false alarm. Spend $100 for a replacement drive. Do not pass go.
- March: Our LaserJet 4M Plus apparently drops dead. It eventually returns to life, three months later, but not before — thinking it permanently dead — we spend something like $650-$700, all told including shipping and supplies, on a new color laser printer (a LaserJet 4500DN) to replace it.
- April: The Baby Benz chews up and spits out most of its right front wheel bearing, wrecking the hub, spindle, ABS wheel speed sensor, dust shield and brake rotor. By the time we catch up on some overdue front-suspension work as well, we've spent over $3000 on car repairs. Also about this time, in the middle of reinstalling Windows on a PC we're turning over to the kids as a gamebox, the PC goes catatonic. I discover through testing that it has fried its PS/2 ports. It eventually turns out to have been a murder-suicide between the PS/2 controller and the keyboard. Everything else on the machine still works perfectly; we just have no way to connect a keyboard to it any more, without which it's a doorstop.
- June: babylon5's internal VXA1 tape drive abruptly fails hard. I mean dead dead DEAD. It doesn't even appear on the SCSI bus any more. I order some extra LTO1 tapes and switch over to doing all my backups on the external LTO1 drive (which, for the last year or two, I've been using for all my full backups, leaving the VXA1 to handle weekly differentials and nightly incrementals).
So last night, my LTO1 drive ingests a tape. I disassemble the drive, manage to extract the tape, and figure out how to open the cartridge and re-attach the leader bar, which the drive has ripped off along with about a meter of tape. In the proces I learn a lot about the mechanical operation of an LTO drive, including how to rethread the tape leader mechanism. I have to do this about six times, because something appears to have gone wrong with the tape load/unload logic, and every time the drive hooks the tape leader it's going immediately to full speed and ripping the end off the tape. On about the sixth try to isolate the problem, a tiny but critical 1mm-diameter plastic pin in the tape leader mechanism shears off. I can't see any way to repair it without disassembling the drive much further and installing replacement parts we don't have and probably can't get. (My engineer's brain insists that tiny pin should have been STEEL, dammit.)
I can't find a replacement for significantly under $400 except on eBay, and none of the eBay sellers will actually come out and say whether or not their damned drive WORKS — it's all euphemisms like "Untested", "As is", "Powers up", "Removed from working system" and so on. Yeah, well, MY LTO1 drive "powers up" and "was removed from a working system" ... that and 99¢ will get you a cup of burned coffee from Charbucks.
Can shit please just STOP BREAKING for a little while? We're trying to put together a house purchase here, dammit!
