Just when you think life is perfect. Just when you've rounded one thosand entries, when you've shown yourself naked, when you've gotten an amazon gift certificate... then your worst nightmare comes true.

Well, sort of. It's not my worst nightmare I guess. And it only sort of came half true. But nonetheless. My hard drive crashed. My 60 gb hard drive from IBM (figures...) crashed. My hard drive full of Smashing Pumpkins concert.

Seriously. I'm not going to go dig up the quote but I know I've written about it years ago. The fear of losing my music. My music is everything. Apart from Skye there's nothing that means more to me, I think. I don't care if that's stupid. I've spent more than 2 years building my collection. And the serious traders will laugh, but I'm happy with my mp3s. I don't want to lose them.

It happened last night. I turned off the computer to go to bed. And the hard drive made a sort of hard whirring noise. And I thought to myself "haha I hope nothing serious is wrong". And turned on the computer to check. And 2 seconds later it goes "BEEEEP" and the boot sequence stops and tells me that there's a problem with one of the drives and that it's going to run scandisk because it knows that the blue colour will calm me down. That's not an exact quote but I'm sure it was the major point of the error message.

So scandisk starts. Checks drive D: and halts after 2%. And hard whirring noises a plenty. So I cancel scandisk and the computer boots. And I can access my D drive. But all is not well. At all. Some of the files can't be accessed. It just gives a whirry noise and an error.

At this point I'm slightly panicking and copying files to my other drive and it's getting way too late. So I go to bed. And funnily enough I don't suffer any nightmares. Not in my sleep. I get up. I go to work. We scrub the walls in the hall. You wouldn't believe the dirt there is. Filthy. All the time I'm half falling asleep because I got to bed too late and half worrying about what I'll do about my computer.

Then I get home. And I watch Dark Angel and drink a can of cold Cola and ignore the problem. Then I take a nap because I'm very tired. Then I run scandisk and it tells me that there's a "data error when reading FAT on drive D". File allocation table. It prevents scandisk from repairing the drive.

I don't know a lot about FAT errors. I know it's not when your computer asks "have you put on weight?". I think it's pretty serious though. I'm going to ask for advice in a newsgroup somewhere I think. But as far as I can tell I'll have to format the drive. And even then I don't know if I can still use it or I'll need to buy a new one.

So I need to format the drive that holds all my sacred and profane smashing pumkins mp3s. This is the part where I usually wake up and I'm lying in bed and my heart is beating because the dream felt so real. Really. I've had the dream several times. But at least in reality I actually have a chance of saving some of my stuff. I can copy some of it, some of it just gives a whirrry hell. A guy on the sp hub gave me a recovery program, maybe that can help me. But the problem is getting the space to backup everything. Right now I'm converting all my SHN to MP3 to free up space. That suck-diddly-ucks for the people who have been downloading from me on the hub. But what can I do? I need the space. And I need to copy as much as I can of my sp music. And all I can hope is that not too much of it is lost. I don't know what I'll do if I lose all my music. Earlier today I was alternating between elaborate suicide plans and just going to bed and staying there for a few years. I know life will go on. But damnit, I need my music.

Skye is helping me. She has 47gb free space. So I'm sending some stuff to her. I can delete it from my good hard drive and get more space for the old stuff.

I have to delete my Zwan VCD. Damn. I'm watching part 1 now. Part 2 later. Then they're gone. They're really cool. But more than a gigabyte big alltogether. So Billy's gotta go.

Alritey. This might have been a boring entry but to me it's like the end of the world and then you take a step back and try to avoid it. Or something like that.

np: nothing