Dude...

If you're asking... you probably already know...

And no, I don't want to know what you did with the body, even if it was a "really super cool idea."

Whew!

When I got my new laptop, I had the bright idea to dump everything off the old one onto the external drive. I'd get the old laptop wiped, and get through the move, and be able to take my time doing hard back-ups.

Good Idea, no?

Not when the USB port on your external hard drive case goes bad...

I wanted to get at something on the external drive yesterday, so I plugged it in to the wall (no drawing power from my laptop... it's hard on the battery!) and plugged it into the laptop, and waited for the puter and the external drive to get all friendly again.

Except... they didn't. No real panic, probably the cable got messed up. So today I found another cable and tried it. No dice.... then I tried both cables on another computer, just in case Vista was the problem.

No Love.

Panic!

Had a bit of a freak out when I realized I couldn't access the information (everything off my old laptop, which equates to about 99.8% of my computing info that's not backed up...) and got ahold of BrotherBrian.

BrotherBrian told me it was more likely the USB than the drive itself, which let me breathe a sigh of relief, but told me to test the drive before ordering a new case for it.

Which of course involved a little techno-geekery, pulling the drive out of the old case and plugging it into the extra slot on Mamaw's E-Machine. Not a lot of geekery, mind, but at least I knew which plug to look for...

I actually did a little happy dance when I started up Mamaw's tower and realized the drive wasn't pooched.

So, the external is back in the faulty case (to keep crap out of it and to keep everything in one place for later) and set aside, info that I wanted to access, the reason I tried to get into the external in the first place, is pulled off onto thumb drives, and a new casing for it is ordered.

Relief, thy name is Mass Storage Device Detected.