h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

..it'd be safe to say that I'm not in the best of moods. I've just come to the conclusion that I'm almost certainly never ever going to see any of my data again. Having my laptop currently in for repair, the hard drive has been sitting upstairs in a very safe place, ready to be put back into my repaired laptop. (the hard drive was perfectly good, and therefore they let me keep it).. upon going to get the hard drive (to take back with me to my flat, since I'm staying with my parents for the week), it rattles. This is decidedly not good.

So, since I've done a lot of work in forensics and data recovery, I fire up my forensics machine with the laptop hard drive attached, in the hope that the heads aren't parked and that the hard drive will still work. Not only does the hard drive not spin up or even make a noise, but an unpleasant burning smell makes itself apparant.

Crap.

At this point, I wonder exactly what's on my hard drive. My entire music collection (my cds, after being ripped, get discarded around the house, so rebuilding this, since my mp3 collection numbers well over 25gb, will be time-consuming, and I won't get much of the music back). 10 years of E-Mail. An ICQ contact list of over 250 people. All of my E-Mail addresses. A truly colossal PGP keyring. The only copies of my multiply counter-signed PGP private keys. Every website I've ever designed. IRC logs dating back to 1996, and countless more megabytes of data which I can't even begin to think of. Suffice to say, most of my life is contained in a small foul-smelling 2.5" crashed hard drive which I have absolutely no hope for recovering any data off. At all.

Quite simply, if anyone'd wanted to cause me any more suffering than I'd already endured this year, getting rid of the data on that hard drive would be about the most mentally damaging thing they could possibly do. Ironically, I laughed at the prospect of this happening only this afternoon, whilst listening to one of the 150 songs I copied onto the desktop I've been using temporarily. "When you like music more than life, something's wrong" (Something's wrong, K's Choice). Discarding all of the other data I've lost, which is just about copable, I've lost just about every megabyte of many many years worth of music build up, and as someone who point blank requires music to cope, I don't know how bearable this is going to be.

This is probably akin to what most people would experience if left to watch their house burn down with everything they owned it, whilst powerless to do anything to stop it happening. Fate has a truly foul sense of humour. "I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours, but I think that god's got a sick sense of humour, and when I die, I expect to find him laughing" (Blasphemous Rumours, Depeche Mode)

I am terribly sorry to hear about your misforture Mate. It can be a shocking blow to lose all your data like that, I know.

Let me know if I can help in any way.

Christ, baby. *sobs with you*

James,
I know its only a small part of your MP3 collection, but I still have those 2 CD's you burned for me, if it would help @ all I could wrap them up and put them in the post for you?
(Borodin, divine comedy, down to the river, lacuna coil, marilyn manson beethoven, new college choir, cradle of filth, eels, NIN, queen, tool, rage against the machine, Rob Zombie, White Zombie, and a few more 'assorted')
xxxx

Thankyou, kind people. *s to you*..

Thankfully, I totally paniced last night, and pretty much ran around the house looking for anything that I thought would help.. and whilst leaning against the doorframe in the room next to this one (which is where all of the old computer junk is accumulating), I noticed the workstation that I built around an old p-233, intending to take to uni to play with as either a firewall or a leave-on-all-night downloading machine, and I realised that it has a 20gb hard drive in it, which it only thinks is a few gigabytes because of the bios.. ..I then realised that at one point I'd intended making that machine an mp3 jukebox, before I realised that it of course wouldn't read the hard drive, and so reformatted said hard drive. But this means that at one point, that hard drive was full of mp3s.. many of which, having left my machine trawling it overnight, I've managed to get back. It doesn't even approach the stuff I had on my laptop, but it's at least something to listen to whilst I try and come to my senses and work out what I'm going to about both the rest of the data and the harddrive itself (I have nothing to put back in my laptop when it returns).

Slightly less paniced and angry now..

- Njan

I'm glad to hear that dear... *rest of comment will be on AIM, as it's too dumb to put here, where it'll be public and permanent*

(...and so she did...)