I moved my main workstation this morning, to plug it into the power meter [[ note to yoyo: the advantage of a hardware power meter is it doesn’t force me to use Linux. Similarly, I can measure the total power usage of my workspace by ganging things together on a power bar through the meter. ]] and to bung in another 2GB of RAM, and in doing so the data connector for one of my hard drives just snapped off. That’s the little plastic 9 (?) pin L-shaped thingy. The one on my boot drive. OK, it’s just a boot drive, one 15GB partition on an otherwise unused disk, but it’s still mightily annoying, not to mention fatal to my startup routine. Enter panic mode.

Fortunately, the metal foil pins that were laminated on the plastic did not break off and were only bent a little. So I retrieved the snapped off bit of plastic and jiggled it into position next to the pins, then gently slid the cable-side connector (female) over the crumbling connector on the hard drive itself. It held. Fetch spare 250GB drive out of my box-o-components, and dd is running now. Exit panic mode.

Speaking of box-o-components, free to a good home: 2x512MB DDR2 PC5300 SO-DIMM. Send me email and I’ll drop ‘em in a postbox for you.