Last night, about 34 hours before I was to leave for Mexico on a jet plane, my eSata drive started ticking. It's a brand new drive in a CoolerMaster X-Craft enclosure, and I use it for backups. I was trying to access it to update some stuff on my site at ElliNude.com, but it was no longer being recognized by either Linux or XP. The drive worked fine in our other enclosure, but that one was already in use. Then we tried the power cord on the other enclosure. Same result.

Now the other drive also ticks and doesn't recognize.

So at 1:15am we gave up on that and decided to go to bed. Only to find that the laptop we added a brand new hard drive and 1gb of RAM to a few days ago now has a critical problem. The hard drive unseats. Or a solder is broken. Regardless, it has trouble finding the hard drive and shows a "no support os" error instead of booting up. This is the laptop we were going to bring to Mexico for work.

So, do we tighten everything down on that one and hope it works? Or do we go back to my 4 years old laptop, put the DVDburner back into it, maybe put the new hard drive in it, and hope IT works?

Holy smokes! I'm about to kill somebody!