Yesterday I got to work, and the network was down. Turns out, the AC unit that solely existed to cool down our server room got fried over the weekend, and the room was up over 115 degrees.

After an hour of freecell, I headed home to work, coordinating with my boss to send me a couple of items to my personal email. I got busy and was working away on my laptop when suddenly.. my computer blacked out and rebooted itself for no reason.

Not. Good.

I tried to boot up using Last Known Good Configuration, but it got to a certain point and then showed me a variation of the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) that said something about UNMOUNTABLE BOOT DRIVE and my heart started to beat a little more rapidly.

So then I booted into IBM’s (I have a thinkpad, a T42) Rescue and Recovery do-dad. I clicked on one of the choices, something about looking at files, and my hard drive started to make this noise:

CLANK. CLANK CLANK. CLANKITY CLANK. KKKKKKLLLLLAAAAAANK!

It was scary. It was NOT a noise you want your hard drive to make. I of course had been quickly trying to recall whether I’d moved the most recent batch of photos from my hard drive to my external hard drive, and if not, whether I had deleted them off teh camera as well (pretty sure i’m in teh clear with all that stuff)

There will of course, be some losses, like my quicken file, and other stuff that I’m sure I haven’t thought of yet, but overall, I’m not too upset about the loss. I AM VERY happy that I bought that external drive last year, because if not, ALL our photos were residing on my hard drive at that time and they would have been lost (except for the inferior copies on flickr).

So after chatting it up with IBM, I should be getting a new hard drive and a set of recovery disks (yay for 3 year warrantees) today at the earliest, friday at the latest. I hope I don’t have to sign for them. I hope they will be waiting for me when I get home tonight.

There will be other losses, like software, because I know some of the software I had was the downloadable kind, and others were of the “so very very old that it’s way upgraded and they’ll make me buy a new copy” kind.

Anyway. Not a good day for computers yesterday. At least, computers that I came in contact with.

How was your Monday?