The Steel Fortress

A few weeks ago I wrote about my post-COVID lassitude and the difficulty I was experiencing in shoving myself out the door and into the world even after the vaccines had made it safe to do so.

Well, the lassitude is over. Two dinner parties last weekend, three the weekend before. Lots of hanging out. Lots of martial arts. I’m planning trips. Lots of trying to get things accomplished, and usually failing because I can’t seem to get other people to do their work.

I’m as bouncy as I ever get. (Admittedly I am not the most bouncy person I know.) But I’m frustrated because I’m not accomplishing as much as I really want or need to.

Take this afternoon, when I was trying to salvage the hard drive from an old desktop tower that had died a lingering death maybe ten years ago. The hard drive has a lot of my work on it that is probably not available anywhere else (my backups have disappeared), so my plan was to extract the drive from the old Gateway, then mount it in a hard drive enclosure and use it as a slave drive wired by USB to a functioning computer.

Well, how hard could it be?

Turns out that Gateway had hidden the hard drive in a steel fortress. I had to take off the cabinet, which I expected, and then tear everything movable out of the interior just to get a look at it. And then there was no obvious way to free the drive from its prison.

After a lot of peering and swearing and turning the machine to various angles and using a flashlight to get an idea of the interior, I found a bolt that might be holding the hard drive in place. The problem was that the motherboard was in the way, so I couldn’t unscrew it.

Well, I wouldn’t be needing that motherboard, would I? A few minutes’ work with a set of pliers snapped off the part of the motherboard that was in the way, and I was able to unscrew the bolt. The hard drive seemed freer than it was, but it still wasn’t going anywhere.

More peering and turning the frame in different ways, and I found two more bolts that seemed to be holding the hard drive in place. The problem was that they were both behind a steel mesh screen.

Gateway had seemingly decided that there would never be any reason for anyone to remove their hard drive, ever.

I managed to unscrew one of the bolts by sticking a small screwdriver through the mesh at an angle that wasn’t so acute that it couldn’t be used as a screwdriver. I managed with a good deal of swearing and sweat to unscrew the bolt, and I heard the satisfying sound of the bolt dropping down into the metal interior of the computer.

The other bolt wasn’t accessible at all, so I got my biggest screwdriver and biggest pair of pliers and set to work on a mission of destruction. Let me just say that I hope the drive is as durable as that steel screen.

Eventually I managed to get a bit of access, and I turned the bolt maybe twice before the slots in the bolt head stripped and the screwdriver couldn’t get any more purchase. After that I tried maybe every tool in my arsenal, but I couldn’t seem to manage to get the bolt to turn. Out of despair I turned to an Allen wrench.

Not to insert into the head of the bolt, because that wouldn’t work. But the ninety-degree turn in the Allen wrench meant I could get it up against the hex nut atop the bolt, and then just sort of massage the hex nut in the right direction. After several minutes of this the bolt finally fell away.

The hard drive was free! It only took an entire afternoon.

I then got out my only remaining Windows machine and connected my hard drive enclosure (which currently has another hard drive in it), and I found that it’s not working.

Also, I remembered that when I mount the hard drive I have to set it to slave, and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to do that. No visible switch.

But those are problems for another long afternoon. Let it not be said that I was defeated by a 17-year-old piece of hardware. It’s far more obsolete than I am, and I will bend it to my steely will.

Though at various points this afternoon, I wished I had my lassitude back