As I was contemplating decluttering my overly web-enabled mind, I decided that my actual digital existence, aka all the photos, music, files, etc. that live on my iMac and my external drives needed some reorganizing and maintenance.

Unrelated to my computer process that has gone quite swimmingly, I’ve been attempting to re-watch the fifth season of LOST in preparation for the final season that starts at the beginning of February. I have all five seasons of LOST on Blu-Ray discs. This is my first purchase of a TV show on Blu-Ray. Except for that re-buy of ‘Firefly’, but that’s a different story. These LOST discs are supposed to have this cool function called ‘Season Play’ that will keep track of wherever you are in the series, episode-wise, and will restart you wherever you left off even if you had removed the Blu-Ray disc and watched something else along the way. That’s what it’s supposed to do, but mine never has worked right. But the discs will play the episodes just fine and all my other Blu-Ray discs have worked just fine as well.

While was organizing files on my computer and waiting for drives to copy and such, I decided to search and see if there was a solution to the problem I was having with the LOST discs. It appears that people with Samsung Blu-Ray players (which I have) can have problems depending on what model and what firmware they have going. Of course, I can’t for the life of me find my manual for my player so I can look at what model I have. (And I’m not going out to my storage closet to look at the empty box in this weather… at least not yet.) But I am reading how some people are having really bad problems with their players, to the point where they won’t play any Blu-Ray discs at all anymore. I use mine much more for regular DVD’s and the built-in Netflix Streaming functionality, which I’ve had no problems with. But a player not playing the discs it was made for seemed way odd.

I decided I would investigate this more tomorrow and for now, after watching Ohio State pull out a victory for the Big Ten in the Rose Bowl, would just watch some more LOST. Apparently my player has been watching what I read online (it is network-enabled) and now won’t play the exact same disc of LOST I was watching earlier, nor will it play any of my Blu-Ray discs. Awesome.

So now I have to figure out what model it is and where my info is about it and see what I can finagle to try and fix it. BLEH.

Update: Figured out that I have a Samsung BD-2550 player and was able to reset the player (held down the >>| key for 5 seconds) and it is now reading the LOST disc again. As for fixing the ‘Season Play’ issue, that’s for tomorrow, or another day.

I got my new backup drive yesterday and after it thawed out for a few hours, I hooked it up, eager to copy all my precious data off my old, ill drive. Unfortunately, the old ill drive is now in critical condition and won’t mount on my desktop and share its data.

I ran a disk recover software all night to see if it could find anything. There is a glimmer of hope, but I think the structure and organization and months of work into my extensive iTunes library is gone. As well as my back up of my entire iPhoto library. Thankfully I did put a lot of my photos on flickr as a backup, but man. All the organization. It makes me sick.

Backup your backups people.

When I get sick of my blog and do something drastic to it.

This time I’m going to be moving it to WordPress, so I may break every link on here and things might be all wonky for a few days… but I will return!