So this guy thinks I'm a liar (a little long)

[An Haddock]

Last week had a guy come in interested in getting his hard drive cloned to a larger drive. Not a big deal - we do these about once a month. I use software called Acronis to basically make an identical snapshot onto a new drive. Process take about an hour on average and usually works with no problems.


Well, I should have know this guy was going to be a problem. It doesn't help that he's easily in his 70's and doesn't understand dick about computers. I had to explain to him three times that the cloning process wouldn't lose ANY of his settings or data - it's like a snapshot. It makes an IDENTICAL CLONE of a drive.

I still don't think he grasped the concept. It's not like when we have to reload Windows by hand.

Anyway - guy drops it off last Friday. I hook it up and start my software. About five minutes into the process I get a message that says it can't clone the drive because it has bad sectors. Normal for a drive that's 8 - 9 years old. I'm a little surprised the system even still runs for that age.

So I reboot and try it once more - same message. This time I leave the message up on the screen so the guy can see it. But instead of stopping in after an hour like he was supposed to he came in like 4 hours later.

The problem with that is I had to keep my data recovery system tied up the whole time so he could see the message. The other issue is that I have a couple of "interns" who come in once a week for a couple of hours. They have varying degrees of being developmentally disabled. This is not normally a problem but sometimes they're... quirky. Like the kid who comes in Fridays, T, is a really nice kid but he doesn't always pay attention or think things through. After my data recovery system had been sitting for a few hours, he closed the Acronis software. He didn't really have an answer as to why he did it. He just did it.

So, of course, a few minutes later the old guy comes in. I explain to him the message my software gave me. (and that I had the message displayed but T closed the software) I explain to replace his hard drive we'd have to reload Windows by hand, copy over his data, etc. He seems to be okay with this, even though he kept saying "but I didn't see any bad sectors!". Just because you haven't gotten a checkdisk doesn't mean your drive isn't going bad - it's frigging 9 years old, I'm amazed it still works.

I'm pretty sure the guy thought I was lying to him... which bothers me because I spend a lot of time and effort building trust with my clients. Like one guy who owns a local company - he'll pop his head in the door and tell me "order me a new laptop". He trusts us to get what he needs and I value that trust.

So now I'm pretty sure the old guy thinks I'm lying to him but he still tells us to go ahead and put the new drive in the system and load Windows. He asked about something else - I forget what - and T interjected himself in the conversation and said we could do it. THAT'S a problem because - it may sound cruel - but the teachers at T's school constantly are trying to get them to NOT interject themselves into conversations. At the base level, it's rude to interrupt a conversation but from a professional level, he doesn't know everything. Whatever it was he said we could do - we actually DIDN'T do. So now I have to explain to the old guy that T is just an intern and doesn't know what we do exactly... and I can just FEEL his bullshit detector rising.

I strongly get the feeling that he's of the mindset that EVERYTHING should last for 20 years. Don't get me wrong - I hate our disposable society. My first tech job had me working in a VCR repair shop when it was still worth it to fix and maintain VCR's. But that's not the way the world works any more. Pretty much any system under 5 years old is probably going to develop a hard drive problem after a few years. They don't make 'em like they used to. I don't think the old guy understood (or WANTED to understand) that.

Guy finally leaves. We put the new hard drive in his system. I had to run out to do errands and grab lunch so I told my tech to load Windows on there while I was out.

Well, apparently the old guy came back an hour later and decided he was going to bring his computer back this week to have it done. So now we have to take the new hard drive out and put his old one back in.

But if he comes back this week... I don't want to work on his system. As I said, I strongly get the feeling he thinks I'm lying to him. It wouldn't surprise me if he took it somewhere else to get looked at/worked on and that's fine with me. But if he comes back in I'm telling him I don't feel comfortable working on it.


Sigh.

[earl colby pottinger]

Hate this

I hate when this happens, the bad sectors can easyily be when there are no files or files so old he is never using them to see any errors.

Of-course he could never clone a drive himself, yet he assumes you must be lying about what you find when he has a bad drive.

The intern was in the wrong too.

[Hanzoku]

Yah, I've had someone pitch a fit when her computer crapped out after five years. According to her, they should be like a refrigerator or microwave, and last for 10-20. She wasn't happy with my explanation that computers are not, in fact, like microwaves or refrigerators, and five years was pretty good for a computer.

[Draco]

Sounds like intern needs to get an internship elsewhere.

[ender]

Regarding bad sectors, they shouldn't require you to reinstall the system if the current disk still boots - but Acronis probably won't want to clone the drive.

Instead, boot something like SystemRescueCD and use ddrescue to clone the drive. It'll skip over bad sectors, and once it's done, boot WinPE, do a chkdsk on the cloned drive and extend the partition.

[PepperElf]

Yah, I've had someone pitch a fit when her computer crapped out after five years. According to her, they should be like a refrigerator or microwave, and last for 10-20. She wasn't happy with my explanation that computers are not, in fact, like microwaves or refrigerators, and five years was pretty good for a computer.

Except that refrigerators and microwaves don't get outdated in 5 years either. They don't get hacked, don't get viruses (unless you're putting some really freaky shit inside them), they might both be plugged in 247 but they're not multi-tasking and trying to do 100 things while you watch the latest video. And it's not as if the new models for the year run "faster" than the previous ones.


But I tell you what, run the microwave constantly for even a month and let's see how long it lasts. Or keep the fridge door open constantly and see how well it runs

[An Haddock]

The intern was in the wrong too.

They usually have a "caretaker" sitting here basically monitoring them but as there's a few kids placed in businesses around town she sometimes has to go check on them, which is what had happened on Friday. She had to go up the street to check on two other kids.

So tomorrow when they come in I have to take her aside and tell her about him interjecting himself into a conversation because we're supposed to report any sort of "disruption" (it's early - can't think of a better word) to the caretakers.

The kid's actually a lot better than some of the others we've had in the last couple of years. I remember this one kid from last year who would CONSTANTLY interrupt people's conversations... you didn't dare talk about video games in front of him because he would try to talk your ear off about them, despite repeated warnings from his caretakers. Plus he got REALLY pissed when we told him to sweep up outside - he considered himself "above" such pretty tasks.

[An Haddock]

Sounds like intern needs to get an internship elsewhere.

Again, these kids are developmentally disabled. It's nice to have the extra pair of hands in the shop and most of them are higher functioning so they can learn to run hard drive testing disks, install software, and things like that. And most of the time they're very well-behaved.

It just seems that a lot of them have trouble remembering that they're not supposed to interrupt people's conversations. Their caretakers are always having to talk to them about it.

Plus the Friday kid's dad is a good client of ours that I don't want to piss off.