I was swapping some hard drives around the other day and was reminded about an old portable USB drive that I had laying around. So while I had one of our family boxes open and its drives disconnected I figured that this would be as good a time as any to tinker around with that drive that was presumed dead for many years now.
My computer was not picking up any signs of life from this device and I had written those files off long ago. I figured maybe I could salvage the USB connection or possibly learn something else from this loss.
After staring at its plastic encasing for a couple minutes and not finding any screws holding it together, I soon figured that those two slots along the edges might be the secret. I wedged a flathead in the one and with a slight upward pressure, the sides became free and I was on my way to dismantling the drive.
My first thought was to plug a good drive into this USB device and see what happens. After that had failed, I tried plugging the old drive into the desktop and after a clean boot — to my surprise — my entire collection of 20 plus gigabytes of digital music was still there.
Just hope Santa brings me some blank CD’s now, so that I may get to the task of burning a backup copy before the drive actually does fail. Something I have learned long ago — never plan on “if” something will fail, but plan on “when” it will.
