p a s s i o n + r e a s o n

Suddenly yesterday, my laptop became less responsive, so much so, that it now refuses to boot.

I think the drive is kaput. I probably have a couple GB's of digital photos there, as well as lots of personal and work data, as well as various MP3's.

I hope to salvage as much as possible and then install a new hard-drive. I also will be needing a new battery, as I'm down to 45 minutes running time.
I'll try to backup my data to my compact flash cards (I just bought a 1GB card and a very fast 32-bit CF-PCCard adapter by Lexar).

I'll see if the freezer trick (wrap up the drive in a towel and ziploc bag throw it in the freezer for a couple of hours) will be necessary. I really don't want to head to data recovery specialists back home, cuz it'll probably cost over a grand to get all my data back.

At least I've been backing up some data (my digital photos). I also backed up my software archive because I needed to reclaim space (for more digital photos). However, my mail and other work data have not been backed up yet (or I have quite old backups on CD-R).

It's as if I should've already learned my lessons - having several HDD's fail (or wiped due to foolishly playing around with FDISK).

Oh well, at least I've been pretty calm (jai yen) about this problem... so far.