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Buggeration - hard disk crash!
Thought I'd get away this weekend, go to the seaside with my wife and son, see if we could find any crabs and buy a stick of rock for Dave, the chappy who's made the graphics for Psycho Fireman.
Dave, holding his gift of rock
Just before I left I had a minor panic attack about being burgled whilst away, and wondered if I should hide the laptop under the bed. Making sure all the windows were double locked calmed me down. Still, maybe that was a sign I really should have backed up the data...
Got home on Sunday night and noticed the screen had frozen - didn't worry me unduly, a reboot should sort that out.
But it didn't.
An hour's worth of googling later and I'm trying to boot off system disks, and attempting to mount the laptop as an external drive. Zilch, nada, nothing is working.
Cold panic is rising, I admit defeat and google "North London Mac Repair". Found a lovely chap called Jim whose website states, "Is your computer unhappy? Jim'll fix it."
Jim tries his best, and diagnoses it as a disk hardware failure, so there's only one thing for it. Send it to a specialist for disk recovery.
This stuff isn't cheap - one estimate I get is over £1200 - so I take a cheaper quote from Fields Data Recovery at approx. £200 to £400, and into a minicab the computer goes.
To be honest with you, dear reader, I am pooing myself with fear, I can't face redoing this project and also another big lump of client work I am currently producing. Please, oh gods of the internet, please let these fine people recover the data so that I can breathe again.
Empty space on my desk where my laptop once lived. Oh, woe is me
Oh, and yeah, I know I should have backups. Maybe this time I'll learn. I feel like an alcoholic saying, "I'll never drink again."
In other news
- We've had 24 levels added to the wiki - which is fantastic, but we'd still like more
- Tony Blews wrote the gateway code that lets my flash stuff talk to the wiki, he's moaning that I forget to mention him and demands a link to his site.
- FLIPPING HECK - PLEASE LET THE DATA RECOVERY PEOPLE DO THEIR JOB!
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