I’ve been off the radar for a few days and for that I apologize. We went on a very nice camping trip to Chance Cove Provincial Park over the May 24th long weekend, about which I’ll write more soon. The real reason for my absence has been a massive computer hard drive failure. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t have been a problem as I usually have a backup drive that keeps everything, well, backed up, so that in the case of a problem, all the critical stuff that cannot simply be reinstalled is not lost. Of particular import are photos and documents, but really, anything that contains original material matters (including email).

A few weeks ago, my backup drive got snargled up and garbled files when I tried to retrieve them and I spent a heady day making sure that the originals still existed, copying, dumping, swapping and fixing and doing all sorts of fun stuff. Formatted and repaired the drive (not in that order) and thought that had done the trick.

Apparently not. What I should have done was replaced the drive.

Monday evening I got back from my trip, dumped the memory card and was in the process of deleting the files from that card after dumping when the main hard drive gave me the blue screen of death and told me that hard drive failure was imminent. That was when I discovered that my backup drive had not been working since it last crashed, so everything recent was in one copy only on a failing drive.

After checking the basics (was the drive seated properly? did switching cables make a difference?), I resigned myself to the inevitable and started salvage work.

I shut down the computer, high-tailed it out and bought a new unit, managed to get the old drive to boot long enough to grab documents, email and half of the photos. The older half, as it turns out. Then  borrowed a USB hard drive docking station, chucked the HDD into the freezer for an hour or so, brought it back up to near room temp and managed to run chkdsk on it enough to make it accessible. This morning has seen two more successes; I managed to undelete the deleted files from the weekend from the memory card of the camera, so now I’m only missing photos from May 15-19, which, to be truthful, I could live without. There’s still a good chance I can get those back, as now the dying HDD is allowing me to modify the permissions on the Power User folder (the old computer ran Windows XP) to claim ownership and I might just (fingers crossed) be able to access at least some of the missing files.

If I’m lucky.

Memo to self: pick up new backup drive this afternoon and burn CDs of all images. Three copies can’t hurt.