The task expands to fill the time available, apparently
The perfect storm? I know what that is. It’s when you hand a piece of technical equipment to someone who knows more than one way to get a job done, and then you watch the job consume the rest of the day, as a minimum.
After receiving my replacement battery pack for my old laptop, I felt driven to find out what might be on the hard drives. No matter that I’d copied that same data to my new machine (years ago). I had to know. And so I dug out the toolkit.
First try, with a large USB key, failed. Turned out that the laptop was due for some updates to the Win10 install (putting a machine on the shelf for several years comes with a cost). Also, this laptop was replaced because the fan was noisy. Guess what? It still is. I started the update process, and during the night things stopped. Failed. Then stopped.
Now, I have other tools in my toolkit. “Let’s reboot the computer with a Linux image”. After downloading an ISO, and finding the necessary package to burn things onto (another) USB key, I started again.
I can see all the drives, but the transfer from one drive to the other (a space dependent task) is now several hours along. I never liked a machine that was anaemic when it came to storage capacity. If (fully conditional) I manage to move all of the data to the second drive, I’ll turn everything off, get out the screwdrivers and move the drive into an external enclosure, which I’ll then cable to my newer laptop.
You can see where this is going, I trust. I’ve managed to commit hours of my (free) time to a job that doesn’t really need doing. But it is more fun than watching the snow melt. Incidentally, we’re supposed to get more of that, overnight.
