Notebook Computer Go Boomps

My notebook computer, the one with all of my work on it, isn't booting. This is the computer that's seen me through thick and thin for the last four years or so. It had some issues early on in its tenure. I replaced the motherboard three times and the LCD screen three times. A blown hard drive early on too. But lately it's been running like a champ.

Last backup of core source was four days ago. Usually I'm much more dilligent but with the flu I've been less so. The storms caused a lot of work on the power lines so I'm guessing that they're to blame for the crash. I have a big "I told you so" on this coming from my father. He bought a surge protector for the power grid of our house a few weeks ago but we haven't yet installed it. I hate it when those parent creatures are so prescient.

So I'm going to get Winternals and try to boot command it. We'll see how it goes. I just want to save my nutrition log, my code for the last four days and that's about it. If I can get to those files I'll be happy. Thus far this looks possible. The hard disk is spinning and providing some files but it craps out on a display driver. Who knows. I predict lots of cursing. Then resting. Then cursing.

Update: Doesn't look hopeful. ERD commander boots properly but can't access the drive. Looks like the hard drive is blown. But not completely. In the boot sequence it does pull some files from the hard drive. I can hear it faintly working a bit. But not enough to mount itself as an OS.

One bit of good news is that my computer is still under warranty. I extended the warranty two years ago and still have 48 days left. That's nice because it means I won't have to pay for a hard drive and will likely have a new one shortly.

Bad news is that I've lost about three days of work. I hate, absolutely hate, rebuilding work. Drives me nuts. The data recovery services are likely too expensive to be sensible. A couple grand and two to three days. In that time I could rebuild the code myself... painfully. Of course, there's also a ton of other stuff on the hard drive that I'd love to have back. Like ICQ histories. Heart rate data. Nurtition data. Emails. Documents.

This sucks. I'm tired and sick. Not a good time for this to happen, but then again, there's never a good time for it. I just hate losing data.

Update: Spent an hour on the phone with dell. Of course they'll never accept my word that the hard drive is hosed. They needed to run me through all the fun customer care screens like "is the hard drive plugged-in" and "can it boot to windows." Can't say that I blame them. I'm sure a lot of people blame things on broken hard drives when in fact it's an unplugged monitor. They're shipping a new one out tomorrow.

Which still leaves me having to redo a bunch of stuff. I'd love to get some sort of data recovery service. But it's probably just not worth it. I need to suck it up and spend the three days to get back to where I was. Of course, before I can do that I'll need to spend a good couple of days getting the os reinstalled and running with all of the tools i need. And I'll need to wait on the hard drive itself. Hoping to see it by Tuesday. Probably Wednesday. Ready to code again by thursday. Back up to speed by next Sunday.

Nice. I lose a week because I didn't back things up.

Oh, and I just remembered some work for a client that I hadn't backed up. Work that they need in the next week. Great. Not sure what I'll do about that.

And the FitDay license that was on the computer. Probably have to buy that again.

And the digital pen files that aren't backed up.

Nice. This sucks.

Update: This is getting worse and worse as I remember things that I have on the hard drive. Maybe some of the data recovery services are in order.

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