Adventures in Self-Employment
Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2005 1:28 pm
And lo, it came to pass that The Bug finally got fed up with Mayo Clinic's glacial employment procedures and the Rochester tech-market in general. Thusly did The Bug place an advertisement in the paper offering his services in house-call format, and it was good. Reasonable rates and itemized billing!
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So, here's the tale of my first call... poor guy. Dude calls me up, describes his problem as best he can (he's ooooollld), says it's a 'block device' error. At the time, sounded pretty simple over the phone; hard drive problems. I ask him details about his system, but don't get much since he doesn't know a whole lot.
Sometime later, I get to the house (a tin-roof trailer, actually--didn't raise my hopes any) and give it a look-see. Well, it turns out it's a hand-made box with all kinds of removable IDE racks in it, plus there's another pair of old computers sitting on the floor. The guy is indeed an old feller.
I ask him to show me what's up... and he boots right into Red Hat. o_0!! No linux geek am I! Even so, I perservere and try to see where it's having a boot problem... it's not. Boots up just fine. Apparently the removable disk in question is used as data storage, and he's been trying to wipe it clean for, get this, the last two years. What stops him is that there is apparently a small partition on it that Red Hat's fdisk won't touch and that his Maxtor boot-disk can't touch either. The size discrepancy is what made him call me.
So far as I can put together, two years ago some dude 'helped' him by going for the 'I'll set up a Linux box with some kind of auto-Ghost setup so he can't break it!' Normally... that'd be great. Break a program? Use Ghost to whack the boot partition and start clean, leaving the data drive alone.
Problem. The customer has memory problems induced by stroke. I got money that says he swapped the drives at some point and Ghost whacked the wrong drive.
All in all, not something I was wiling to touch with a ten-foot pole. The guy that set him up left little or no instructions, at least none that I could find. I sent the customer to the local Linux User's Group for help and didn't charge him a cent--I didn't have the heart to, given that I'd not been able to do anything for him. I figure the penguinistas in the LUG will be able to at least determine what's actually wrong and get him going... if they can make sure the customer remembers everything.
Maybe tomorrow I'll get a call I can actually deal with. I know for certain I'm gonna have to look into those boot-CDs with all kinds of utilities for the future.
---
So, here's the tale of my first call... poor guy. Dude calls me up, describes his problem as best he can (he's ooooollld), says it's a 'block device' error. At the time, sounded pretty simple over the phone; hard drive problems. I ask him details about his system, but don't get much since he doesn't know a whole lot.
Sometime later, I get to the house (a tin-roof trailer, actually--didn't raise my hopes any) and give it a look-see. Well, it turns out it's a hand-made box with all kinds of removable IDE racks in it, plus there's another pair of old computers sitting on the floor. The guy is indeed an old feller.
I ask him to show me what's up... and he boots right into Red Hat. o_0!! No linux geek am I! Even so, I perservere and try to see where it's having a boot problem... it's not. Boots up just fine. Apparently the removable disk in question is used as data storage, and he's been trying to wipe it clean for, get this, the last two years. What stops him is that there is apparently a small partition on it that Red Hat's fdisk won't touch and that his Maxtor boot-disk can't touch either. The size discrepancy is what made him call me.
So far as I can put together, two years ago some dude 'helped' him by going for the 'I'll set up a Linux box with some kind of auto-Ghost setup so he can't break it!' Normally... that'd be great. Break a program? Use Ghost to whack the boot partition and start clean, leaving the data drive alone.
Problem. The customer has memory problems induced by stroke. I got money that says he swapped the drives at some point and Ghost whacked the wrong drive.
All in all, not something I was wiling to touch with a ten-foot pole. The guy that set him up left little or no instructions, at least none that I could find. I sent the customer to the local Linux User's Group for help and didn't charge him a cent--I didn't have the heart to, given that I'd not been able to do anything for him. I figure the penguinistas in the LUG will be able to at least determine what's actually wrong and get him going... if they can make sure the customer remembers everything.
Maybe tomorrow I'll get a call I can actually deal with. I know for certain I'm gonna have to look into those boot-CDs with all kinds of utilities for the future.