Life just got a little suckier--again.

Oh my gosh. I sat down at my laptop to post something tonight when my hard drive made a clicking noise and the computer froze. I rebooted, it kinda worked, symptoms got worse and now I can't boot, my drive clicks away and...NONE OF MY DATA IS BACKED UP. I was just complaing to a friend of mine that with such large hard drives these days, the only practical way of backing up is to copy files to another hard drive. I have an old 10G drive in the garage I was going to set up for this purpose too. I just hadn't gotten around to it.

Anyway, here's the deal: I think I just lost EVERYTHING. Some time back I merely lost my class notes. This time I think I've lost all my music, including some I'd composed myself and all my pictures for the last six years or so.

Any sympathy would be most welcome.

I can fix almost anything if I put my mind and the right tools to it. This one may be beyond me, though. I did open up the sealed case that holds the platters (which they assemble in a clean room with full-on bunny suits!), but there's not much to see in there and I'm afraid of contaminating the platters. Here's my only hope I think: the click is so loud that I'm thinking maybe the mechanical locking mechanism that holds the heads in their off-platter "parked" position might not be disengaging properly.

It's 2:30am, I've been beating my head over this one all night. It's time to get some sleep.

Will I ever learn?! I'm so sad.