Technical Damnation

Way back when I hatched my scheme to switch from PC to Mac, I bought a 160GB Seagate brand external hard drive to facilitate the process. It worked like a charm. The day I bought the Mac mini, I plugged the Seagate in and they were recognizing each other like long lost Army buddies.

Well, while Jen was off gallivanting in Europe last month, we had a power surge or something here at the house and the Seagate freaked out and now neither the mini nor Jen's laptop will recognize it, even though they used to get along and play nicely together in the past. I called Seagate tech support and the guy on the other end (a native English-speaker, but still quite obviously dumb as a bag of donkey manure) told me it sounded as if I would need to reformat the Seagate and start over from scratch.

I had resigned myself to this process and after almost two weeks of putting it off, I was undertaking it Saturday. I decided to go back to the source and reinitialize it on the Gateway so I could resave all the stuff I had previously saved on it so the Mac could once again use the files.

Lo and behold, the Seagate is still on speaking terms with the Gateway. All the files were usable, readable, openable (??) etc. In the interests of worst-case scenarios, I backed up all the files FROM the Seagate TO the Gateway, even though these files are scattered across various folders on the Gateway. I did that so they'd all be in one spot (i.e., one folder named "Jay's Crap" and one named "Jen's Crap.")

Just for shits and giggles, I unhooked the Gateway and tried to see if the Mac and/or the laptop would read the Seagate in the hopes that maybe somehow putting the Seagate with the Gateway "unlocked" it or some such computer voodoo bullshit, but no: neither mini nor laptop recognize the Seagate.

So now I'm stumped. My instinct says I should reformat the Seagate on the Mac, since that's the "main" computer now (I don't care if the Seagate becomes a blank slate now that I backed up my back-ups on the Gateway), but my razor-keen instinct also says that with my luck, the Seagate would then only speak to the mini and forget its old friend, the Gateway. Furthermore, I need the Seagate's 160GB storage capacity so I can warehouse big files, like the songs I've put together in GarageBand, which are insanely massive files. Oh, and all the porn, of course.

And no, the Gateway does not burn CDs because we didn't get a CD burner on it when we bought the motherfucker in 2000, which was my decision so I get to take the blame for that lack of foresight -- although I am considering having one installed just for that purpose, even though that would be an incredibly roundabout ass-backwards, not to mention costly, way of doing it.

At this point I would probably just buy a new Seagate (different brand, obviously) if these things cost $50 or less, but since I dropped nearly $200 on it, I want to try and see it through to its bitter conclusion. For lack of a better term, so I can get closure on it.

Any computer geeks out there reading this, please feel free to leave comments (besides "Sucks to be you," obviously).