Disk crash

I forgot to mention in my last post that one of the reasons I've gone dark here at TumblingDuke was that my laptop's disk crashed.

I'm pretty spotty about backing up my data (but at least I do it), and it had been almost a month since I did it last. The thought of loosing a month's data/work/email was pretty terrifying. As far as stress goes, I think a disk crash ranks right up there with totaling your car.

I tried some of the free disk recovery tools that are available on the net, but none of them worked. Then I tried a commercial product for NTFS file recovery and it was able to identify all my files. Don't know much about the other products on the market, but I can personally recommend Stellar Phoenix.

It actually works! Cost me $100, but I felt it was a bargain. It was able to recover all but about 3 files. I was blown away.

Bought a new drive, upgraded Win2K pro to WinXP pro and was back in business.

Asside from suffering through a sleepless 36 hr. recovery/install/upgrade nightmare, I'm OK.

One lingering problem is that my wimpy old laptop freezes up occasionally, but I can live with that for a while before I have to replace the whole thing.....