Have You Ever Lost 36 Gigs Of Data?

September 5 2005, 3:20pm

What a weekend! It was supposed to be labour day weekend. Michael was coming down from North Bay with Allison. I was supposed to meet up with them for lots of eating and drinking; and we did eat a lot! It was supposed to be a great weekend, except for one thing! One of my hard drives with a total capacity of 40 gigabytes crashed on me! Let’s build up the story! Weekends for me recently starts from the time I step into the church basement to play ball. I played well, but not on the same level as previous weeks. There were also too many players at the gym. Usually, we would like 10-12 players, so that we can go hardcore and play full court basketball for 3 straight hours; with a substitute available for each team. That night, there was enough players for 4 separate teams. This was already an ominous sign. I had a lot on my plate this weekend. Besides the usual chores, I also attended my first instructed Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) class at Ultimate Martial Arts. The workout was pretty tiring. Many of the drills pushed me to the limits. I was already tired from working one hour of striking, heavybag and weightlifting. 2 additional hours of MMA ensured that I would feel sore for the rest of the week. My neck, abdominal and back regions were extremely sore. I felt it’s very worth while because core muscles are key in MMA, and that’s where I really need to slim down and get in shape. Over the weekend, I met up with Michael and Allison for quite a few times (I will blog about these in a separate entry). I was also going to dedicate some time to catching up with my blogging. I’ve missed doing an entry about Robin’s wedding and I wanted to restart Babe Theory blogging. But then it happened!

All my remaining spare time was spent diagonising what happened when I turned on my old desktop. I was simply going to offload some of the data I’ve collected in my laptop like I’ve done several times. This time, the computer boot but with one drive missing. I rebooted the computer and notice there was strange ticking sound. I’ve never had a mechanical failure on my drives before. I can handle partition problems, as well as software and operating system issues. So imagine my terror when I realized the ticking sound was from the missing hard drive! Foolishly, I try every trick in my arsenal while being careful to maintain data integrity on the drive. The hard disk does not contain operating system and is totally comprised of personald data files (I won’t divulge what they are on this public forum), suffice to say that I’ve thrown away a lot of the CDs where these data come from. You may ask why I was so stupid to consolidate all my precious ‘data’ on a single drive. I did it with the intention to build the desktop into an all in one media center computer. My entire asian/chinese collection has now been wiped out with about a quarter of my english collection. I quickly thought of where my backups were, but there simply was no way to recover the entire collection except to pay anywhere from $500 to $2500 for a professional hard disk recovery. It’s pretty much certain to me now that the read/write heads are malfunctioning, thus causing the ticking sounds. Is it worth it to pay for the recovery? I don’t think it is, but it will be very time-consuming to recover as much ‘data’ as I can. The unfortunate accident may prove to be motivation for me to complete my goal to digitize and organize the rest of my collections. This is a large setback for me. But I will prevail. Giving up is not in my vocabulary!