Struggling on

I’ve been back in Plazac for nearly a week following my Mum’s funeral in the UK and life has to go on. I’ve managed to get quite a bit done on 28AAD since arriving home – in fact I’ve completed the main repair work and am almost in a position to begin the rebuild but for tidying up paintwork and doing the small repairs needed to the pod – but it’s been a bit of a struggle and I’ve been unable to post any pictures.

The reason for this is the problems that I’ve had with my main computer that have turned out to be much more serious than I originally anticipated. The machine just failed while I was using it – the screen simply blacked out even though some power was evidently being supplied – and I originally thought that its main power supply had failed. However, I now know that it was much worse than that, because it’s the hard disk itself that has gone belly-up, and the reason why it’s so serious is that the drive contained EVERYTHING of mine of importance – photographs and videos from before and since I came to France including ones of my Mum, Toddie, my house and garden, friends, visits and much more, plus documents, emails, music recordings and even things like software that I purchased via download. And I have no backups or copies of the great majority of it.

I am still clinging to one slender ray of hope, however. Due to the mode of failure, I think that the disk drive itself has not been physically damaged and that it’s the controller card that has gone wrong. That’s the green printed circuit board in the image below.

If so, then I may be in luck as a search on the internet has revealed a company in Canada who claim to be able to repair controller cards with a 95% success rate. So today I have carefully packed it up, paid the $49.99 fee and will be leaving shortly to send it off to them. Then it will just be a matter of waiting and hoping. If it is successful and the drive starts working again, the first thing that I’ll do, of course, will be to back up all of the important data on it. If not then I’ll remain as I am now, which is a bit like someone who has suffered a house fire and has lost nearly all of their treasured possessions.