/log

Wednesday started out well enough. I wrapped up my lesson planning, headed to school, gave a decent lesson and then observed another teacher before heading home. Once home, I sat down to check my emails and prepare for the next day.

It’s interesting how little things can completely upset your plans. Booting my computer I couldn’t get past a kernel panic — essentially a problem with the core of the operating system. The hard drive is split into a few partitions, the sizes and locations of which are listed in a so-called partition table. Well, the root partition that should have a size of ten megabytes, now shows a size of one.

This is a problem.

I headed out to one of the university computer labs to see if I could figure out what the problem was and whether there was any solution. Reading up on Internet posts by others with similar problems I found a tool that might just be able to fix the problem, but first I’d like to copy the (hopefully still intact) data to somewhere safe. Then I’ll hopefully repair the partition table and — fate allowing — get the drive working again with minimal data loss.

But first I need to get access to the machine. That’s not quite straight forward in the case of my dear Satsuki. In an effort to give the Vaio TZ it’s small form, the designers placed the hard drive deep inside the body. With the help of step-by-step guide from the website inside my laptop I removed about a dozen screws from the bottom, pulled the keyboard off, and unscrewed the hard drive. The plan was to connect the hard drive to a USB case and access it from another computer. Unfortunately, the drive uses a new type of connector that doesn’t fit into the socket of the case I borrowed from my brother for the task.

So, no luck yet. Thursday was mostly spent grading and instructing students at the University doing experiments and this morning I’ll be teaching my inertia module. Satsuki, I’m afraid, will have to wait for a little while yet.