The Day I Broke Patrick Christopher's Computer

WARNING: The following article you are about to read has very little to do with sports, other than the fact that it stars a college basketball player. It is probably the nerdiest thing you will ever read on this site, but if you’re someone from the blogging world, then at least your inherent geekiness will soften the blow. You have been warned.

As Cal gets ready for the Pac-10 tournament today, I’d like to share this anecdote for all you Cal fans involving a personal encounter with a certain Cal Basketball Hero.

Way back in October before the college basketball season started, I was assigned a simple task from my old roommate, fix her friend’s computer. Both of us are Cal graduates, and unfortunately for me, I graduated with a Computer Science major. Graduating from this major comes with many positives and negatives. The positives are ease of finding a job compared to, oh philosophy major, vast knowledge of the internet, and free up to date software given to us from Berkeley. The negatives are dealing with nerds in your class, being labeled a nerd, and the assumption that you know how to fix everyone’s computer. Everyone makes this assumption, EVERYONE.

Normally, when someone asks me if I can fix their computer, I’m usually a little hesitant to do so, mainly because I don’t want to be held responsible if I accidentally destroy said computer. However, since it was my roommate was phoning in a favor, I happily obliged. I was even more excited when I found out the client was none other than Cal’s favorite number 23, Patrick Christopher.

Before I continue, I should probably back track a bit. Pat and my old roommate have been pretty good friends for some time. Thus, it was a common thing to have Pat stop by unexpectedly to hang out. Here’s a picture of him chilling at our apartment for those who think I’m pulling shenanigans:

He’s using my roommates Mac because his computer is clearly busted, thus the point of this article. And yeah, our apartment is really messy.

At first, I was rather star struck to the idea that the star of Cal Basketball was loungin’ in our apartment on random days, but after a while, it became a regular thing and wasn’t that big of a deal. I also have to say that Pat is a really cool guy. He’s down to earth and very mellow, and most of all, a very humbled kind of guy. Thus, when my roommate told me his computer had a virus, it didn’t really bother me to offer some help.

The next day when I got home from work, Pat came over to drop off his computer so that I could repair it. I thought some simple anti virus software would do the trick. I did it before for another friend’s computer, so why should this be so difficult? Just download some anti virus software then presto, computer is good as new!

Two minutes later, I sent Pat’s computer into the blue screen of death. For those of you unfamiliar with the blue screen of death, it’s basically a screen that pops up after the Windows XP loading screen is finished:

After you get this little baby, you can pretty much say goodbye to windows, because you ain’t gettin’ back in it. All you can do is a reformat, and of course tell Cal’s star basketball player that you just destroyed his computer.

Pat was pretty calm about the situation. He kept saying “don’t worry about it” but deep inside, I’m sure he was thinking “worry about it!” Pat also informed me that it wasn’t really the functionality of the computer he was worried about, but rather the data on the computer. Within the heaping wreck of a hardware that I turned the computer into were cherished photos, files, and probably some game footage. In college, there is nothing more valuable to a student than memories, and I may have blue screen of deathed them away from existence.

After that day, I told Pat that the problem would probably need a few more days while I scrambled to find a solution. Reformatting was easy, but finding a way to pull the data was not.

My first choice was to call some data recovery experts. How expensive could it be right? 50, 60 bucks? Try 2000. Wow. I can’t really fathom what kind of data would be worth that much, unless you had some Jack Bauer nuclear codes in your computer.

My friend Dan then informed me getting out with hardware. If I could pull out his hard drive and plug it into my computer using an adapter, it might work. Here is the adapter he pointed me to:

It’s a basic IDE&SATA – USB convert it. Think of it as a way to turn your internal hard drive into an external one, thus allowing another computer to treat it as a travel drive that you can use to transfer files from hard drive to hard drive. In all, Dan’s suggestion made sense, so it was worth a shot. And the adapter only cost 20 bucks, much cheaper than trying the Jack Bauer option (the data recovery, not torturing my computer for the information).

After I got it set up, I plugged the adapter into my computer and prayed for mercy, only to be rejected like a Mark Madsen jump shot. Apparently, Pat’s hard drive was partitioned more than once, making some discs unrecognizable to the standard Windows XP operating system. Crap. My experimenting failed. All the meanwhile, Pat was patiently waiting for his computer back, continuing to tell me he was cool with what’s going on. Good thing Pat was being such a good sport. If I was fixing Tyler Hansbrough’s computer, I’m sure my liver would have been disemboweled already.

At that point I was stuck. Really stuck. Stuck on how to fix his computer, stuck on how to break the news that I couldn’t fix his computer, stuck on dealing with the possibility that Pat was going to have me banned from Cal basketball games for the rest of the season. My last shot was asking my friend who actually worked for Microsoft. If anyone could help me navigate through a Windows error, it must be him, right?

And I was right! The only ironic thing was that his fix involved NOT using Windows. Instead, he told me to create a Linux boot cd, run the Linux OS straight from the CD, and then I would be able to use a Windows like operating system to transfer files from Pat’s internal hard drive to an external hard drive.

Genius. Two hours later, Pat’s files were safe and his computer was reformatted.

So what’s the moral of this story? Never offer to fix someone’s computer. Ever. EVERRRR! Unless you happen to be my friend from Microsoft, and not me.

Oh, and the other moral is that Patrick Christopher is a really cool guy. From what my old roommate tells me, Pat’s computer is a little messed up still from my workings (once again, sorry Pat). If someone messed up my computer like I did, well I would be pretty pissed. Not Pat though. Off the court, he’s calm, laid back, and a nice guy.

On the court, though, he’ll fuck you up. Word.