Death of a Hard Drive: The 7 Stages of Grief

I am no stranger to grief over the loss of loved ones, and I have grown more sophisticated about loss in the last 14 years as the death of my mother continues to have impact on my life. I wasn’t aware of the Kubler-Ross 5 stages of grief until years after her passing, and it might have made my mental state and those experienced by my sisters a bit more explicable to me. The 5 stages are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Kubler Ross developed her model while working with people who were dying of cancer and her model is a little more linear than what the survivors of a loss experience. It leads to the notion that there is some specific length of time during which the grief matures, similar to the stages of growth of a fetus in the womb, and when the proper length of time has passed, bereaved people are supposed to recover, as in the case of a fetus, where at approximately nine months, the baby is born.

I was going to equate the following experience to Elizabeth Kubler Ross’es grief pattern, but I discovered a better model on a site by Jennie Wright, RN, RTT, GC-C. It is a seven-stage model. The seven stages are:
1. SHOCK & DENIAL
2. PAIN & GUILT
3. ANGER & BARGAINING
4. “DEPRESSION”, REFLECTION, LONELINESS
5. THE UPWARD TURN
6. RECONSTRUCTION & WORKING THROUGH
7. ACCEPTANCE & HOPE

I believe these stages might well be applied to more life-changes. Change of career, loss of opportunity, physical trauma and many other things. We live in a society rooted in Puritan Ethics which basically boil down to the statement that we all deserve what we get, so all the things that happen to you are either God’s gift, for being a good Puritan, or God’s punishment, for failing in some aspect of faith. We are also taught to persevere as individuals and to “Cowboy Up” which means to stoically sublimate pain or painful emotions to get the job done. With these two bases, it is not surprising how little feeling, effort or money is allotted to maintenance of the poor or homeless, is it? As an example of a micro-event that illustrates the grief pattern as it applies to situations other than the death of a close family member or friend.

On 12/31, the hard disk on my aged testing machine went down. I entered a stage of numbed disbelief.

I thought to myself, “most people are celebrating New Year’s Eve, watching Bowl Games and enjoying themselves, and I am sitting at my computer, late into the evening resuscitating a hard drive.”

As the shock wore off, I started berating myself for not having done a back-up over the Christmas holidays the week before. “You knew it was an old machine and the information and the set-up would take forever to recreate.” I considered numbing the pain and recriminations with alcohol, and since it was New Years Eve, I might be said to have done so.

I moved the dead hard drive to the slave position and put in another old 40Gb hard drive to make senior on the ribbon cable. I installed Win2000 on the fresh hard drive and downloaded the iso for Ubuntu 8.10 because it is a live-disk distro and can be used to look at drive partitions (and sometimes fix them). I installed a firewall, service pack 4 and a few other utilities on the new windows-formatted drive and found my last unused cdr, and burned the iso of Ubuntu to it.

Anger and Bargaining. I was not able to fix the problems of the dead drive. The message from GParted, which is one of the best partition-editing tools I know of, was:

GParted 0.3.8

Libparted 1.8.9
Check and repair filesystem (ntfs) on /dev/sdb1 00:00:40 ( ERROR )
calibrate /dev/sdb1 00:00:28 ( SUCCESS )
path: /dev/sdb1
start: 63
end: 80389259
size: 80389197 (38.33 GiB)

check filesystem on /dev/sdb1 for errors and (if possible) fix them 00:00:11 ( ERROR )
ntfsresize -P -i -f -v /dev/sdb1
ntfsresize v2.0.0 (libntfs 10:0:0)
ERROR(2): Failed to check ‘/dev/sdb1′ mount state: No such file or directory
Probably /etc/mtab is missing. It’s too risky to continue. You might try another Linux distro.

My reaction to this message was to attempt to install the Ubuntu operating system to my fresh hard drive. I blew the working Windows 2000 installation away and ran through the install steps of Ubuntu, which I like better than Windows and which would certainly be better able to get at the dead drive from a traditional install.

When I rebooted after the install, Ubuntu refused to boot up. It dropped me into a busybox shell, which is a state from which I could find no exit. What had gone wrong? Where was the error? Maybee it had been confused by the presence of the dead drive on the cable. After all the dead drive was still attempting to give me trouble-shooting messages from beyond the grave. There were problems accessing block 95 and 96 and sectors 25 through 39. I was pretty sure that the MBR or the disk index resided that low on the drive. This might have messed with the install since it didn’t just tell me once. It told me the page of error messages over 750 times, which meant the basic post-boot period took considerably longer than the 30 seconds it usually does. It took about 45 minutes to boot to the first install screen. So I reinstalled Ubuntu with the dead drive removed from the cable.

The same failure to boot followed by the helpful busybox command line obtained.

I started searching, on another computer, for the possible cause of the error. The best diagnosis from the forums and blogosphere was that the standard Ubuntu 8.10 install needed 384Mb of ram to load. This machine had 256Mb of ram. I started looking for new memory for this old machine. The memory was PC800 RIMM memory. The only retail outlet I found that mentioned this type of memory was offering it at $99 per 128Mb stick. Since this was $99 more than I had paid for the computer, I felt righteous and indignant that the world could be so unreasonable as to ask so much for memory for a motherboard that hadn’t been manufactured since 2002. Especially since memory for currently available motherboards was available for about $8 per 128Mb!

I found an ad on eBay.com that had a buy-now price of $7.99. This was great, except my eBay password was in an encrypted file on the dead hard drive, and the password-retrieval email I used was a work email that I had forgotten the password for and, since I would have to get on the server to look at that email account’s web interface and the webserver admin access password was also in the encrypted file on the dead hard drive, after a furious circular rage at myself for being so stupid, I gave up on it entirely. I gave my wife a terse bulletin of the progress so far, and she cheerfully offered to use her eBay account and get the memory for me. It was too late, however. I had left the Anger and Negotiation stage and entered the Fourth Stage of Grief: Depression, Reflection and Loneliness. I couldn’t very well be depressed and lonely, I reflected, if I had somebody cheerfully offering to help, so I cut her off and gave some far-fetched excuse about how unlikely it would be that the eBay memory would work anyhow and that I wanted to fix it TODAY, not in a few weeks whenever the eBay seller might be troubled to mail the useless broken memory. I couldn’t see how hurtful it must have been to my wife, or how far I actually was from wanting to fix the problem by then. I wrote a line in my journal at that point “Am I using this unsolvable project to avoid the real work I could be doing? Yes, of course.”

I took a nap and woke up in the 5th stage of grief: The Upward Turn.
I was pretty sure I had solved the memory problem. I would get the alternate install disk and try that. I went to my wife’s machine and downloaded the iso. I found that her CD burner was not functioning, so I went back to my machine and reinstalled Windows, in a drive partition of 10Gb, so I could leave it in place when I added the holy-grail Linux on the drive. I loaded all the same stuff I had done before when I was at this step, whistling while I worked.

I slipped into the 6th stage of grief: Reconstruction and Working Through
I was pretty sure at this point that the old dead drive was unrecoverable by any means at my disposal, so I was “really” just adding Linux to the drive because I liked it better than Windows, and it was unlikely that Microsoft was going to keep producing patches for Win2000 indefinitely. I went out and bought a new 50-pack of CD-R disks and made an ISO of the Alternate Install Disk for Ubuntu 8.10.

It had the same error when I did the install on its own partition. I was not dismayed. I went looking for Linux Distros with smaller footprints. I found PuppyLinux and DamnSmallLinux. Neither of them would install to my drive partition, but PuppyLinux had a really neat GUI interface and DSL is only 50Mb on the iso and will fit on a business-card CD disk. In this research I also found a live-disk utility of GParted which I used to reduce the Linux EXT3 partition to 5Gb for some time in which I discovered a small-footprint linux that I could load to the drive, and then I made the resultant free space into a fat32 partition that I could access easily both from the Win2000 side and from the future Linux side.

Finally I had entered the 7th stage of grief: Acceptance and Hope. I am working from the acceptance that my old data is gone and will not be recovered. I may hang on to the old dead drive, in case I go to one of Scott Moulton’s advanced data recovery classes at some point, but I have moved on. I have discovered that the most current stuff was pretty easy to recreate. I use imap mail, so once I had access to my mail again, all the old stuff was still there. I am already planning to get a new computer in a month or so, and the world is brighter. I apologized to my wife for my odd behaviour.

My lesson in this was that I hadn’t realized until the very end of this episode that it was possible to go through a grief cycle over a piece of hardware, but when I went back over all my actions in the last few days, it is evident. It was not a very long cycle, thank goodness. I chose the Seven Stage Grief Pattern rather than either of the 5-stage models or the “New Grief Stages” at the website Recover-From-Grief.com because the depth of the model better reflected the qualities of my experience.

References:
WWW Resource, “7 Stages of Grief”, http://www.recover-from-grief.com/7-stages-of-grief.html , accessed 1-4-2009
WWW Resource, “5 Stages of Grief”, http://www.recover-from-grief.com/5-stages-of-grief.html, accessed 1-4-2009
WWW Resource, “New Grief Stages”, http://www.recover-from-grief.com/new-grief-stages.html, accessed 1-4-2009
WWW Resource, “Kubler Ross Stages of Grief”, http://www.cancersurvivors.org/Coping/end%20term/stages.htm, accessed 1-4-2009
WWW Resource, Ubuntu Home Page, http://www.ubuntu.com, accessed 12-31-2008
WWW Resource, DistroWatch, http://www.distrowatch.com, accessed 1-3-2009
WWW Resource, GPartEd LiveCD, http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php, accessed 1-3-2009
WWW Resource, PuppyLinux, http://www.puppylinux.com/, accessed 1-3-2009
WWW Resource, DSL Download page, http://damnsmalllinux.org/, accessed 1-3-2009
WWW Resource, Scott Moulton’s page, http://www.myharddrivedied.com/, accessed 1-4-2009