"Darkness Absolute"
By: Von Stupor
Chapter F
"Get up!" Packrat commanded, slapping Dennis in his face while he was sleeping.
Dennis snapped awake and gave him a stink eye.
"Sean will be here anytime, so come on!" he commanded, indifferently.
He arose from bed and blundered upstairs. On the way, he noticed Dolimus sitting in the rec room.
"Why aren't you ever upstairs often?" he asked him.
"There's a lot of sunlight up there," he said.
"Oh, that's right. Okay then!"
He continued upstairs and sat in the living room, and within a half hour, Sean pulled up into the driveway while Dennis let the dogs out front.
After some greetings, he brought Sean inside. There he met Kay, Von Stupor and Packrat.
"You mean you seriously brought them--" he started, when Dennis cut him off.
"Don't bother asking, let's just keep going," he said, chuckling.
They all journeyed downstairs with the exception of Kay and headed into Dennis's room. Dolimus joined them.
"Alright, here we go!" said Dennis, extracting his hard drive from the exterior containment unit and handing it to Sean.
He popped it into his laptop and attempted to fire it up. Unfortunately, his laptop didn't detect the hard drive.
"Well, I guess it's time for my backup," he commented.
"Ah, you came prepared?" Dennis asked.
"Yep, I have Linux installed on my machine, so we can try it using that."
"Hmmm... since the files have password restrictions in Windows, would Linux detect them?"
"Nope, Linux bypasses all Windows password restrictions."
"Jawsome!"
He tried opening Linux, but it still didn't detect the hard drive.
"Bad things are not supposed to happen when we're this close. Why are they happening?" Packrat asked Dolimus impatiently.
"Just wait, we don't know it will work or not yet," Dolimus hushed.
"Looks like it's time for my backup backup," Sean decided, reaching into his bag.
"Backup backup?"
"Yep, I have another version of Linux, called Kinoppix, on CD."
"Perhaps if you loaded up your hard drive and used mine with the exterior containment unit?" Dennis asked.
Just then, Sean stopped.
"Wait... how did the hard drive go in?" he asked, flipping it up and down. "I feel so stupid, I might have put it in there upside-down... Well, if we try it this way..."
He stuck it in one way without Linux and the computer wouldn't recognize it. He tried the inverse and Linux still wouldn't recognize it. After thinking for a moment, he realized something.
"Look at the pins on my hard drive! Does yours have any jumpers on it?" he asked.
Dennis's search returned nothing.
"That's the problem, then."
Sean plucked the jumper off of his, which served as an extender for the pins and placed it on Dennis's hard drive. Loading it into his computer, it was finally recognized and accessible.
"This is it!" Von Stupor whooped. "We shall be home in no time!"
Then all of a sudden, Kinoppix wouldn't write the files to the jump drive due to permission restrictions.
"So you can access the hard drive, it just won't let you put them on the jump drive?" Dolimus asked him.
"Yes, but I don't know why it won't let me change the settings when I'm the root user! Or wait... am I? Hmmm..."
He hopped into the shell and tried to change the computer's root settings to that of the hard drive, but to no avail.
"Well," he said. "Does your computer have two CD drives on it?"
"Nope, just one."
"Damn, I thought so... I'd burn them to CD, but I have to keep my CD in the drive, since it's running off the CD."
"I have a computer with two drives at my parents' house..."
"Yeah, but we're here and not at your parents' house..."
"Yeah... well, wait! Why don't I try loading Kinoppix on my machine and then copying them straight to my hard drive by using my laptop hard drive as a jump drive with the exterior containment unit?"
"That could work, let's try that."
After hooking up the necessary components, Dennis fired up Kinoppix to see it found both hard drives just fine. However, due to more unchangable permission restrictions, he couldn't copy it to his hard drive.
"I'm... stumped..." said Dennis, confused.
"Well, why not try loading Linux from his hard drive, then using the laptop hard drive hard drive as a jump drive, and since Linux can bypass the password restrictions, try loading it all to his hard drive and burn it to CD?" suggested Von Stupor.
"That will probably work, let's try it!" agreed Sean as he removed the jumper extender from the laptop hard drive prior to Dennis installing it back into the exterior containment unit.
Everything was then found perfectly fine and Sean began burning it all to CD.
"This is it..." Von Stupor said. "We are finally going home..."
"This is just what we've been waiting for..." Dolimus added. "Well Dennis, we're sorry we couldn't help... at all, ha ha."
"It's okay, really. I enjoyed just having you guys there with me." Dennis replied, smiling. "Let's all enjoy Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, as celebration, and then I'll take you all back home."