Recovery Process

Yep, my hard drive died. Without warning, inexplicably.

It’s very odd, because this has already happened to me once before but at that time, the death of the hard drive was a slow thing that gradually crept up on the computer. I received the dreaded Blue Screen Of Death for a few weeks leading up to the total collapse of the thing. This time, there was nothing of the sort. My computer was fine, I went to eat lunch, as per normal, the machine went on standby/sleep mode and after I came back, I shook the mouse around to get the screen and PC back up… only nothing happened. So I reset my machine, and when it started to load up, it, quite simply, failed to find any hard drive connected to it. It got a bit hectic yesterday, because afterwards the Wife tried to test the drive on her computer and somehow that resulted in HER PC also not starting up, but a few panicked hours later, the Neighbors from downstairs (who run their own business involving lots and LOTS of computers) managed to fix her PC, which was a simple problem of the computer having a bizarre “boot sequence” where it was trying to load up the operating system from places it shouldn’t have… like the network, instead of its OWN hard drive. Unfortunately my problem was much more straight forward, the hard drive is simply dead with no explanation. Just a month or two after its warranty expired as well, conveniently enough.

We brought it down a tech store where a couple of Uber Geeks looked at it and pronounced that even with power running through it, the disc inside refused to spin, so this was essentially fried hardware. Fortunately the only thing that was irreplaceable were a few pages of Lost In Loveless, but an earlier incarnation of the novel–dating back to January–existed on the laptop and the Wife’s flash memory card, a legacy of when I transferred my files over so that I would still have something to work with while my PC was on slow boat from Singapore. Other than that, everything else was non-essential. I have reinstalled pretty much everything that I need, but it’s still baffling that the silly thing decided to just up and die like that. Oh well…