I lost everything. . .

. . .in The Great Crash of '05. Well, just about everything. I did manage to keep all my music files -- thank God I keep them on a slave drive. But, everything else is kaput. And, in a nod to frustration, fate has decided to render Windows incapable of saving any of my settings or preferences. It's taken me a few days to even remember the password and username I have set for the blog. I'd grown rather dependent on Netscape's Password Manager. If I'd known the manager would be so unceremoniously fired, I'd have prepared better.

It could be a while before I get back up and running again. I'm going to have to start scrimping and saving a little to buy another hard drive and put a fresh install of Windows on it. As my good friend blondie pointed out, simply reformatting my current hard drive will leave me vulnerable to errors and bad sectors on the disk, and I'm liable to have to go through this again in the near future. But, if I hook up my current master drive as a slave, I may be able to get some stuff off of it when I install the new master. We shall see.

I suppose I should count myself among the lucky ones. Computers have been a part of my daily existence for nearly ten years now, and this is the first hard drive crash I've ever had. Unfortunately, when you go so long without ever having such an incident, it convinces you that maybe you have something figured out, and that such trivialities as regular data backups are for rank amateurs and newbies. Well, I know better now.

Hopefully, I won't be too long in getting back up and running on all eight cylinders. In the meantime, suggestions on how to appease the crash gods so that I might recover the lost data would be greatly appreciated.