This is the Self Preservation Society The Self Preservation Society

Put on your almond rock and daisy roots Brush your Hampstead Heath Wear your Whistle and Flute Lot’s of La-de-da’s and cockney’s ‘ere Look alive and get out of here

Get your skates on mate Get your skates on mate No bib around your Gregory Peck today, hey! Drop your plates of meat right up on the seat

This is the Self Preservation Society The Self Preservation Society The Self Preservation Society (Repeat to fade)

There are many Firewire & USB 2.0 housings that you can pick up fairly cheaply from some of the computer supply sites or ebay. I use one quite regularly to do backups and move very large files via sneakernet. I put the original 20 GB drive that came with my Powerbook in it when I upgraded to a 60 GB Travelstar.

Yeah Gabe, let me add my voice of thanks for keeping MotoringFile up and going. I read it every day and it definately helps feed my MINI mania!

As for your harddrive and data recovery, I’ve had harddrive failure myself on my PC (back before I went MAC) and an IT buddy of mine suggested something that sounded completely rediculous but worked like a charm: freezing the drive.

Most harddrive failures are heat-related. Heat expands the drive disks themselves and they get off track from the reading arms (picture a turntable needle running between the tracks on the record). The interesting thing is that most of the time, all of your data is still intact, your drive simply can’t physically access it. The fix is to seal your drive in a plastic bag (to keep out condensation) and toss it in the freezer for a couple days. The cold makes the drive plates contract back down to their original size and the drive can sometimes actually work for 5-15 minutes until it warms back up all the way. It doesn’t always work and your drive may have another fault not heat-related. But the best part is that it won’t hurt anything to try. The trick with a laptop drive is finding a way to hook it up. If your Powerbook is anything like mine, it’s hard to run the computer with the drive hanging out (at least not as easy as a desktop). If you can hook it up through another sort and grab data off in chunks, you might be able to recover all your critical data. The “freezer” method did work for me (and has worked for other friends of mine) when my drive died.

Good luck with that, with the job search, and thanks a bunch for all you do with MotoringFile.

-Juan

Your participation on White Roof Radio’s podcast is also a lot of fun.

Please keep it up as long as it is good for you!

Saludos

Your hard work and ceaseless thoughtful enthusiasm has made my MINI buying and owning experience one of the best ever and I have been buying cars since about 1953.

I envy you your energy and hope it never diminishes.

No english lessons this evening. Just thanks.

Bruce

PS: Did we get straightened out about the contraction and possessive forms for “it”? “It’s” is the contraction for “it is”. “Its” is the possessive for “it”. Happy Thanksgiving.

So, as the saying goes, Let’s Motor!

   BCNU
 Rob in Dago

I also wanna say thanks to all people that came to MISANo…they made this event an unforgetable experience and hope to see you all in the next…

And of course my parents for buying me the MINI…:P:P:P:P…..

Hard lessons are never forgotten. Thanks for all your hard work Gabe!

Chris

I probably deserve that :)