Bad Sectors

I didn’t sleep well that night. Not after having potentially ruined the hard drive and a lot of photos, videos and important documents that we needed for the trip. I had dreams where the netbook was miraculously fixed and we simply got on with our day. When I awoke to check the status of the system restore that we had left going through the night, it was bad news. It had paused halfway through and it was showing that it had been running for 3 minutes 51 seconds when it had actually been going for about 8 hours. We had a few options open to us: we could leave it going and hope for the best, we could cancel it and try and have a look at the innards ourselves and hope that it was just a loose connection, or we could take it straight to the nearest computer repair shop in town…if there was one. We went with option 2 and unscrewed all of the tiniest screws known to man and prised off the back case to reveal the inner workings of our beloved netbook. All seemed OK from first glance (which was also not good news) and we checked all the connections and pushed everything that looked like a plug or lead firmly into place, just in case. We reconnected everything and booted up, only to find the exact same problem…the black screen and a consistent whirring pattern form the hard drive. Not good. The only good thing about this situation was that James had encountered this exact problem a few times so he at least had some working knowledge of laptops insides.

The laptop.....with the Blue Screen Of Death

The original plan was for me to visit a place called Waimangu Volcanic Valley and for James to write some more scripts/screenplays whilst I was away taking photos of anything and everything. That wasn’t going to happen now! Our first port of call was an office supplies shop on the high street in Rotorua, and I asked the lady if she knew of anywhere where we could get our computer fixed. She knew just the place, and thankfully it was just down the road and we wouldn’t have to drive miles to get to one. It was called Talk Tech Now and we were greeted very enthusiastically by a chap with a goatee beard and a short mullet hair-do. We began telling our story of woe and he knew exactly what to do to check how poorly the hard drive was, as this is a very common affliction to laptops and netbooks alike. He talked tech stuff (hence the shop name) at us briefly before telling us that he would check it on his Linux system and see what the damage was, and then we could hopefully just drag it onto another computer and store the data on our external hard drive until we could buy a new internal drive. He connected it up and said three words that shocked us to our core – “bad news guys”. Apparently he had spotted six “bad sectors” (I know, I just smiled and nodded and pretended that I knew what he was talking about) and needed to check where they were on the drive. One of these bad sectors was on the boot sector and this was VERY bad news. He then quickly shut down the system check as it was getting very unstable and then proceeded to tell us our/his options for recovering the data. It all sounded very Mission Impossible-style as he said that he would have one swing at it (and emphasised this very dramatically as if he were Tom Cruise in said movie) and that he needed to get in and get out before the system became too unstable. It was either that or we took it to a forensics specialist in Hamilton (and hour away) that would inspect it in a dustless room, and that would be very expensive to do.

The best option that he/we came up with was to grab as much data from this “one swing” and place it somewhere else i.e. another netbook. Very conveniently he had one that he had refurbished as the original customer had brought it in for repairs and never came back (due to the recession he couldn’t afford to pay for the repair). So somehow we ended up buying the second-hand netbook (which is very similar to our current one) and left it with him whilst he set about transferring the data. It would take a long time to do this so we said we would come back at the end of the day and see if he had cracked it by then, metaphorically, of course.

That meant that we had most of the afternoon to kill so I could still go and see Waimangu Valley if I wanted to. After the wallet taking the hit on the netbook situation I was unsure whether I wanted to spend more money walking round a potentially soggy forest that stuck of bad eggs. But as the weather was clement I decided that maybe we should get a positive out of the day and so that we wouldn’t simply remember Rotorua for the bad netbook scenario. James stayed in the campervan (and went for a walk later) as I paid my money and entered the valley on my own. As it is the off-season (we think February by our winter standards, but if this is their winter then they are very, very lucky!) I hardly saw anyone else in there. It is essentially a long walk down the valley for about 4 to 5 miles with an information leaflet to tell you about all the places you stop off at. I was instantly impressed by the first view – huge hills of forests surrounding a cauldron in the middle with steam emanating from its core. Everything just got better from there. It’s hard to tell you about all of them but one of the best areas was the small pool set in a crater and surrounded by jungle and forest which had the most unusual light-blue colour to it. Every corner I turned had something amazing and different to look at: steaming hot springs, spouting mini-geysers, huge craters left from volcanic explosions. It has to be one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to. And I’ve been to Bradford. It was made all the more glorious by persistent sunshine, not 100%, but enough to warm me up and cast great light and shadows onto everything in front of me.

But my thoughts were elsewhere...

I returned back to the campervan to find James reading his book with the side door wide open – it truly was a lovely “winters” day. I had had to rush through a lot of the valley as we needed to get back to Rotorua to check on the status of our netbook with Malcolm. We arrived back at the shop hoping that he had managed to get everything and we could pack it all up, pay him his fee and set off for Taupo. It didn’t happen like that at all. You see, there was a LOT of data on there and the stability had got worse and worse and there were more bad sectors now, so he would have to leave it running through the night and us to pick it up the next day. I don’t know if this was all a ruse to get us to pay more or to make us wait because he hadn’t finished it, but at the end of the day there was nothing we could do about it now, it was in the lap of the Gods. Or Malcolm’s…

We needed to be in Taupo early in the morning, so that meant leaving Rotorua and finding a free site nearby so that we could get in, do our stuff, get out and back up to Rotorua in the afternoon to (hopefully!) pick up the netbook and be on our way. We had identified a spot on the map but had difficulty finding it, but we eventually found somewhere reasonably secluded, but on the side of a quiet road with nobody around. It was cold that night and we both wrapped up in our Warehouse winter clothes and James got his hot water bottle on the go early doors. We also saw the most amazing sight when we left the campervan for the first obligatory toilet break. The stars. We have seen stars before, both in the northern and southern hemispheres, but because we were out in the sticks with no light pollution and no clouds there was the most amazing view of the stars I have ever seen. There must have been hundreds upon hundreds up there, and compared to the occasional 20 or so (Orion’s Belt, the Plough, etc) you get back in a city in England this was just incomprehensible. I don’t exactly know where we were but I will always, always remember that sight of the stars outside our little Hi-Ace.

Unbelievable...