pc woes

Yesterday was a very frustrating day. It started as one of those work days where you're not at all sure you even want to come back to the place the next day, and it ended with a hard drive failure on my home PC that looks to be particularly serious; not only do attempts to repair the drive fail, my Windows XP CD can't even see the disk anymore even to diagnose it, much less to re-install the operating system.

My hope is that the seriousness might be at least partially mitigated, as I actually have two hard drives in this PC, one containing the OS, applications and preferences, with the other holding all my data. It's possible, and at least at first glance seems likely, that only the former actually is hosed and that my data might actually still be fine, just not accessible at the moment while there's no OS. Keep your fingers crossed and think happy thoughts on that regard.

While buying a new drive, and then reinstalling and reconfiguring XP and all my applications won't be fun--there's my weekend, pretty much--at least I might still have the majority of my data, my gigabytes of photos, digitized audio, personal files, etc., which would be a truly wonderful thing. In fact, I almost hate to mention that things might not be completely fucked up, out of fear that I'll jinx it and my usual terrible luck will kick in to ensure that everything is irreversibly irretrievable. Still, one hopes.