I’m in the midst of a reinstall of the OS on my laptop. It is not going so well.

Luckily, I saved all my documents off onto CD because my new SimpleTech Portable HD is having problems. I hate to say failed because I’m hoping that the tech support will be able to help me save it tomorrow. But, I plug it in and it doesn’t show up on my desktop. As I said, I do have another copy of my documents, but the portable hd has all of my images and music.

If I can find another computer to hook it up to (need one with dual USBs and my old laptop only has one), I can see if anything changes when I hook it up to a different computer. I really don’t think it’s this computer because my wireless mouse works in both USB slots on this laptop. Unless, even plugging into both USB slots it is still not getting enough power, but then why did it work long enough to save all my documents and stuff to it and then fail overnight? An external power supply is not included with it so I can’t try that out to see if that might be a problem.

I really hope SimpelTech tech support will be able to help me with this hd. It’s been longer than a month since I purchased it so I can’t take it back to best buy. I’ll have to return it to SimpleTech if it’s failed. And, my journal is on there and copies of tax returns and well, everything. darn.

Then, next issue — when I reinstalled the OS, (Tiger) I lost my version of iPhoto. I had to get the old version of it off my old laptop that has Panther on it. I guess the last time when I archived and installed, it didn’t erase the app, but this time because I was starting fresh with an erase and install, it wasn’t in the version of Tiger that I had. I’ve got it fixed now on the new OS, but can’t get to my pictures anyway because they’re all on the portable hd. Oh, joy.

Also, the disc burn function is not working properly. It worked fine a month ago. But, now it will write the data to the CD, but it will not verify at the end so I get the message that the disk is faulty and to try again with a new disk. But, I’ve done it 3 times now and get the same error message with each disk. I’ve used other disks in this container without the error message so it is hard for me to believe that it is the disks, especially 3 in a row. But, it makes me think the CD/DVD drive is going bad. The new install of the OS did not improve this situation.

Argh. Usually things like this go so smoothly for me. Not this time.