Damaged
Sometimes life has a way of punching you in the gut when you least expect it, irreversibly changing your life forever. This morning I woke up and flipped open my laptop as usual for my morning RSS feed reeding to discover the screen was completely frozen, with the clock stopped at 3:20am… letting me know when the disaster had occurred. A reboot simply returned a cryptic “Grub Error 17″ and discontinued booting.
Anyhow, after running a few diagnostic tools from a boot disc utility my fears have been confirmed. My hard drive is dead. This is quite disappointing, as I didn’t quite expect it to happen on a laptop so new. Unfortunately, I have lost:
- Basically any code I have written since September, which includes a ton of AOP exercises, Scala examples, a funtime app I’ve been writing to run on Android, and quite a few other personal projects
- 10 Gigs worth of photos I hadn’t bothered uploading to flickr yet
- Notes and audio clips from Agile2007
- Documents and information on houses I’m currently looking at
I can kind of live with most of these being now lost, except for the code. Not only was some of it for personal development time projects in progress, but there were a lot of projects on my laptop that I was actively learning new things with. Arrggghh!!! 
Anyhow, anyone have any idea where to find a new hard dive for a Sony Vaio PCG-6J1L?
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February 14th, 2008 at 2:04 am
eeek *hug*
February 14th, 2008 at 8:48 am
My condolences. Wow. I know it hurts. It’s happened to me.
February 14th, 2008 at 10:39 am
JC, Sorry to hear about the hard drive failure. Have you thought about sending it off to one of those recovery services? It is usually really expensive, but it sounds like you lost a ton of good stuff. They physically remove the platters and put them into a hard drive enclosure of their own to get your data. It might be worth considering.
February 14th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Hmmmm… maybe. getting a new hard drive won’t be too bad (I can probably find one prett y cheap) but I’m debating whether or not all of the stuff I lost is really worth the recovery services prices.
I mean, I had a lot of good stuff on there, yet losing it is more of a inconvenience rather thanlife threatening.
February 14th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Sorry to hear about this! This exact scenario had literally been a reoccurring nightmare of mine up until a couple of months ago when I decided to go ahead and just pay $50 a year for Carbonite. I know there are a lot of other and arguably better solutions to backup but for me… Carbonite just works (at least so far).
I’ve been sleeping much better lately.