Well, the last few days have SUCKED. A LOT. On Monday, I noticed my disk IO was getting really slow. After doing some drive analysis, I saw my C: and D: drives were up around 50% file fragmentation. o_O Solution! Defrag the drives! Oh how I would regret my hasty decision... I deleted some files I knew I didn't need so that the defragger would use disk space more effectively. All through Monday night and Tuesday morning it chugged away, optimizing the layout of my files for my enhanced computing pleasure... Tuesday morning I decided I would defrag drive D:. Within minutes of me setting pyrallis on his task, I heard an AWFUL, bone-wrenching screech from the heart of my case... It kept going and going and going... I desperately tried to stop the disk defragmenter, but the desktop was completely unresponsive. Resigned, I simply shut the computer off. Hoping everything would be okay, my mood dropped like a lemming off a cliff when I saw the phrase "MASTER BOOT DISK ERROR, READ FAILED". This was my primary drive and comprised half of my total disk space. It also had all of my important data (bank and credit card passwords, pictures of Laura, source code, my local CVS repository, all of my school work, my e-mail) which hadn't been backed up in since September 9th. After class, I tried installing Windows on one of my other drives so I could hopefully grab a few files off of the broken drive. I did manage to recover a few files, but nowhere near all of it. But I had an idea! Maybe if I installed Linux I would be able to recover the rest of the files! After an emergency trip to CompUSA in Des Moines with Evil Chad for an 80 GB Western Digital drive, I installed Red Hat 8.0. <tangent> RED HAT 8.0 IS AWESOME!! The UI is FAST and USEFUL and PRETTY! The command line is FAST! The installer was EASY! Package management is trivial! Oh man... I am glad I installed it. It's so much fun, easy as Windows, and gets rid of the boring everyday blah that Windows was giving me. Good job Red Hat. </tangent> Anyway, I spent about a day installing Red Hat and getting NTFS support to work (thanks to this great article). By this point, my evil drive must have sensed something was going on, because when I tried to plug it in again, it wouldn't even let my computer boot. O, CURSED DEMON FROM THE DEEPEST PITS OF HELL! THOU SHALT NOT BRING THY EVIL UPON THIS WORLD OR BLESSED COMPUTER EVER AGAIN! I DAMN THEE FOR ALL ETERNITY TO THE DARK CORNERS OF MY BOX! I picked up the drive, threw it down into my trash can, picked it up, punched it, and then hit it against my knee. In the future I must keep in mind that heat is bad for hard drives. Also, all hard drives will eventually fail (and without much warning! (especially the IBM 75 GXP line)), so I should back things up far more often. Once a month just isn't good enough. Oh well. I'm lucky I've had few troubles so far. Data isn't everything. :) Although some are beginning to equate it with memory... my boss and his crazy research projects for example... but that is for another day. Thanks to Laura for putting up with me and keeping me sane. ^_^