Many many years ago, I bought a box.

Now this was no ordinary box.  It had to meet specific, if somewhat flexible, requirements.

All I wanted was some way of connecting up a hard disk to the network so I could access my files from anywhere.  It seemed simple enough?

Anyhows, I searched and found there was only one yoke that seemed to fit my needs.  I bought it.  It arrived.  I plugged it in.  It worked.

I played around with it and it seemed to do slightly more than my simple requirement.  It not only shared all the files on the drive but was a media player too, so I could stream music and videos.  Perfik!

I plugged in the first drive and it was a roaring success.  I was happy because that drive was in a bit of a poor shape, with a smashed casing after I had once dropped it.  I didn’t want to move it again, so sitting it permanently beside my new box was the grand solution.

I tried plugging in a second drive.  The fucking thing wouldn’t see it!  I did a search on the Interwebs only to find hundreds of complaints about my precise problem – the box would see some drives but not others.  I contacted Support.

Now Support were remarkably cooperative.  They assured me I was the first to report a problem like this, so I sent them the results of my Google search with all the complaints on it.  They suggested all sorts of solutions, none of which worked.  I ran all sorts of diagnostic tests and sent them the results, and even gave them access to the box from wherever they were.  No fucking go.  Nothing worked.  I gave it up as a bad job, and not long after, they took the box off the market.

I have been using that box ever since.  It does work with the broken disk so I was reasonably happy, though I wasn’t too sure how long it would last.

I recently came across another little disk that I thought I would try my luck with.  It worked!  I was able to transfer my more important films and stuff onto that.  That worked well for a long time.

Until last night.

We were happily watching a new series [“Chance”, starring Hugh Laurie who I like as an actor].  Halfway through Episode One the fucking power went.  Bollox!  Luckily I had just cooked up a stir-fry though I hadn’t gotten around to doing the rice and chips [Herself prefers chips – anything to be awkward?].  So we sat in the gloom eating our stir-fry [without rice or chips] until the power came back, with its usual cacophony of chirps, beeps, clicks and farts from all the devices that were switched on.

I fired up the telly to resume our viewing.  Nothing!  I checked the box by connecting over the network.  All the files were there but they were all corrupted, and my old broken drive had disappeared altogether [though it was still happily humming to itself on the shelf].

I spent the morning tearing my hair out.  The last time I saw anything as fucking temperamental as that box was the last time I looked in the mirror.  But if it was going to be stubborn then so was I.  So I spent ages rebooting the fucking thing [it’s very small and al solid state but it takes about fifteen minutes to reboot].

I got it to work.  But it refuses point blank to see my poor old broken drive where all my music is.

So now I have had to plug the broken and the good drives into the one laptop [which mercifully can see them both] and transfer everything off the broken one.  Have you any idea how long it takes to copy nearly a Terra-bite of files?  Don’t try it if you’re in a hurry!

Iomega iConnect – a pile of shite but it does work sometimes.