Today my PC at work froze completely, like time had stopped. Neither snow nor hail nor Control-Alt-Delete could budge it. Even the power switch had become just so much case decoration. I pulled the plug and, gamely, it tried to boot. The disk made a noise like someone who had just gone upstairs to get something but had completely forgotten what it was they were supposed to get. (This is a vague clunking sound. I'm sure you are familiar with it). Then I saw the blue screen of unhealth.
Two words sprung to mind. The first one was "Oh".
I tried powering off again and letting things cool off. The RAM was properly seated. I tried to boot off a system CD. Another reboot, another blue screen. Thinks looked bleak.
I gave our hardware support guys a call. They said to bring it over. As I left my PC with them my calm began to crumble. I was leaving the denial phase - the first of the five stages of hard drive loss.
The hamsters of inescapable awareness were whispering to me all of the things that were sitting on that hard drive that I had forgotten about or I was doing my best to not think about. I ate a miserable lunch, watching the fish in the restaurant fish-tank glide serenely by, as if they had never heard of head crashes or bad sectors.
I thought of all the opportunities I had had to back up the data and not taken. The completed work was not a problem. All of the deployed stuff was on at least one, and often two, servers. It was the work in progress that I had not backed up. There was a lot of work in progress. Not all of it was mine. My baked potato was eaten in silence.
I got a call after lunch - "Should we try reformatting the C partition - maybe we can save the data on the D partition?" Tough choice - sacrifice my main partition in the uncertain hope that I might be able to drag something else back off the platters of doom.
I suggested they try making the drive a slave and plugging it into another PC. The result - after a number of reboots and runs of DiskCheck, was... complete recovery. Every single file was fine and ready for me to copy onto another PC.
Which I did. The really sensitive stuff is now sitting on three hard drives. Tomorrow will be a day of reinstallation and reconcilliation.
Tonight, I am tired. Very, very tired.
8:50:47 PM 
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