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Swans Fighting

Bent

Brakes

Last Friday, I went to see my local GP about a rather annoying sebaceous cyst in my right shoulder. It was inflamed and sore, and had already been there for a week, so he put me on flucloxacillin, 2g per day. Jump to Wednesday morning, nothing much has happened, though the rate of growth has slowed – I see a different doctor at the practice in the morning just have it checked, and she says to continue the antibiotics until Friday anyway, at which point she’ll book a surgeon to lance it if it hasn’t change.

Wednesday night, it was a good bit larger than Wednesday morning, and I had hell getting to sleep. Rang the practice at 8:00 AM, got an appointment with the first doctor I saw at 8:40 AM. At 8:50 he asks me what I had planned for the rest of the day – ‘Surgery?’. By 8:55 AM he was on the phone to the on-call surgeon at A&E, and then the bed manager. By 9:05 I’m out the door of the practice with a letter in my hand, and by 9:20 I’m seeing the triage nurse for admission to A&E.
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Someone at worked asked me to take a look at their old laptop for them – apparently it wouldn’t boot, wouldn’t even power on some days, and generally was being a pain. I agreed to take a look at it, and see if I could get any data off of the drive. The owner offered me any payment I wanted; wine, women, song, cash, animals (!?!?!?). The laptop arrived on my desk a few days later, and I took a look at it today.

It’s an IBM Thinkpad 1400 model 2611. That’s a Pentium II 266 or thereabouts, running the original Windows 98 with a 5 GB hard drive. The original power supply had been replaced by a badly fitting Targus one, and the only nod to the modern world was a Firewire port and a modem. Plugged it in, hit the switch, and up it came, albeit slowly. I decided to strike while the iron was at least lukewarm, and pondered how to get the data off – there was no USB port so I couldn’t use a stick, the optical drive wasn’t a writer, and there was no network port either.

I happen to own a Dell Inspiron 8200 from 2001 or so – and it has all of the features I needed to get the data off. So, 30 seconds of searching on the ‘net for the 1400 service manual, 10 minutes of unscrewing and removing bits, and I had a hard drive in my hands. A hard drive that rattled. That’s never a good sign. 2 minutes later it was in my laptop drive bay, and 5 minutes after that I was staring at a KDE desktop (bootable Kubuntu CDs are good things). Grabbed my PCMCIA USB2 adapter (the laptop only has USB 1.1) and my portable drive, and started copying data off – which didn’t take very long, it was at most 500 MB of data. Copied the data from the portable drive to a CD-RW and everything is groovy.

I’ll take the disc to work tomorrow for the owner to borrow, and when they’re sure everything is off, I’ll re-assemble the Thinkpad and give it back.