the remains of the drive

Blogging was put on hold for the past few weeks because of so many little things that added up to... well, no blogging.

This is the first:

The laptop hard drive crashed. As in, blue screen of death and all. Irrecoverable errors. The problem was with the drive itself and not the OS (which would have been easier to handle).

Technician at HP could only smile sympathetically and say, "we cannot assure you ma'am that we can recover the data", although they will replace the HDD unit as it was still within warranty. Fortunately.

Am still hoping that the data can be retrieved but I have to brace myself for the possibility that it will be gone. Unfortunately, the last backup was done Jan 1, 2007, so I'm going to have to say goodbye to nice pictures from Pacific Malayan visit, the lisianthus picture that I was so loving and wanted to place on notecards (the version on flickr is low-res), the wedding pictures of Mandy+Allan, Julius+Erica, and Pam+Jonathan (aaarggh--I was pretty in these pictures!!! especially the Julius+Erica)... Also gone would be Dallas v2's baby pics, Zeester#1's Palawan trip (aaaarrgh, so many nice pictures there!), and all the scrapbook kits that I downloaded from Jan 1 to the present which I wasn't able to back up yet. Some of them I had to watch for everyday! And for them to be gone, in a wink.

One of the pictures whose high-res copy I am bound to lose:


It's like the past three months have just been erased, just like that. I feel like crying but I can't.

Sigh.

The tragedy of it all was that I was indeed scheduled to do a backup (at least of all pics and scrap-related stuff) around mid-March.

I was not able to backup because lately I've been focused on putting up the wireless network (which is temporarily useless now that the laptop is out of commission) and resurrecting the Duron, which Donnell was able to do, bless his soul and his alternate life as a computer technician...

Since the Duron was resurrected last weekend, I was planning to transfer all my files to the Duron hard drive, which, IMHO, would be more stable, and easier to retrieve. Unfortunately, Nins was so busy the past few days and our schedules didn't work out, so I was not able to reserve a chunk of time to copy the files. Besides, the long weekend was coming, and I would have all the time in the world...

And then, horror of horrors, the blue screen of death descended upon us. Sigh. I want to turn back the hands of time (Superman? Flash?) and just pull an all-nighter to copy everything. Alas, I do not live in the DC universe. Neither the Marvel one.

And so, a lesson learned: Always backup, don't wait until you can do a one-time backup that would fill one CD because you never know. I waited until the pictures could fill up one CD. So wrong. Of course you can append files to CDs.

It's the same with life, right? Don't wait to do things that will make you happy because you never know. Hee. Tama ba namang haluan ng metaphysical eklavu.

Sigh.

-oOo-

Because I was feeling tremendously down when I left HP, I treated myself to a Razon's halo-halo, which is just across the street from HP's service center along Jupiter. This was the first time I had a Razon's halo-halo. It was absolutely divine, I tell you, divine.

Doesn't make up for a crashed hard drive, but it was a wonderful picker-upper.


Last Song Syndrome : Jumper - Third Eye Blind