Malfunctioning Hardware

April 24, 2013

There’s nothing like a computer problem to put it all into perspective.

For nearly the last month and a half, I have been working really hard on my boutique photography business (Shameless plug… GarBaby’s Photos). I had some sessions over the weekend that really excited me and with the party I shot a few weeks ago – I was eager to finally post photos and share some sneak peaks. Everything finally felt like it was going to move forward in a very positive and successful manner.

Until…

I took a break.

I had a great photo to post for Earth Day, but when you spend your days and nights with Adobe Bridge, Photoshop and Aperture… isn’t a break allowed…

I left my desk and did some other non-photo / computer related things.

I came back to my computer to post the Earth Day photo and saw a message that the Time Machine Back-up Failed. I found this odd and then saw a yellow exclamation point on one of the photos I was going to edit. Odd. I noticed that the hard drive was that awful translucent blue/grey and then the dreaded message The disk you entered was not readable by this computer. So direct – so cold. I mean… what kind of a message is that. Seriously….

My husband, the professional IT man was equally as direct. It’s dead.

But no… that’s impossible, I thought. Because I – the non-IT-artistic-magical person want to tap my magic wand and have everything back – working again – in minutes…

There are a list of technical terms and jargon that no go with repairing hard drives: sectors, blocks, bad blocks, format… I could go on, but the words are too dry for me… So technical – not creative – MEAN!

I’ve dealt with hard drive issues before – in particular this hard drive… so I should have known. I had stopped using it once before… but now – I dumped everything on there. literally. The photos from this past weekend’s shoot that I was so excited about were on there in organized in folders for my editing delight. Talk about feeling hopeless… When all you want is to transform .ARW and .NEF raw images and you can’t – it’s an incredibly hopeless feeling. No one can do anything quickly and you have to wait… Patience is a virtue indeed, but when it’s your business and the only employee is you… this is potential panic mode.

After a melancholy dinner, I retreated back to my office in silence to plug, unplug and listen to the sounds of potential death that were emitting from my not-so-darling hard drive. How tragic this was – but why wasn’t I crying… I was sad, yes – but always hopeful…

Soon thereafter, my magical IT husband presented me with recovery software! HOPE! I smiled a larger than life smile as I downloaded it onto my computer. I read what I needed to read, all the while dreaming of my photos from upload sessions past.

The most frustrating part of this whole thing is that just when I felt like things were going to stabalize with this business and just when I felt like I had a flow going… a system in place… it imploded! It flashed a yellow alert and was over. Just like that.

The scan didn’t work. It was plugged in for nearly two days and no file was recovered. In fact, all I got was a message that MR. IT read to me this morning. It’s dead…like I said the other day.

Each night I dreamed that one file would appear— hope… but nothing appeared. My husband was obviously not nearly as hopeful.

There’s something about IT professionals. So factual. So matter-of-fact. Where’s the emotion… where’s the love…

While I was crying the tears of my soul last night over my lost photos and “failed” business, MR. IT was likely thinking of solutions… Thank Goodness for him!

The light at the other end of the tunnel was scanning my SD cards… where the photos came from in the first place… at least the ones from 2013. I had no idea how much was going to be recovered, but gave it a try!

2 disks and 2 recovery programs later, my weekend session photos are recovered.

I found a place in the city to take my “dead drive”. The commercial looks promising…