Computers seems to have become my enemy since early last week. For starters my ISP 'upgraded' the infrastructure after which I had no internet access for a couple of days. When I did get it rectified I realised that the update had disabled my wireless router and nothing I said to the customer care made them help me with it. Their arguement was that my connection is for a single user and wireless is not supported. I feel that the real issue is these guys don't know how to solve the problem. I lost patience, gave it up and went back to my old ways. Login till 10.30 and hit the bed. Early to bed and early to rise.... It was quite relaxing.
After reading a blog about someone losing data, I had stored all my important data on an external drive. My laptop has been acting a little iffy lately and I was (still am) bracing for a crash. Time for a windows overhauling. So I backed up office stuff too. I was almost done...last few MBs of data transfer were remaining when things froze. Windows freezing abruptly is no big deal. I tried booting up again... My Dell had crashed! I had a very smug feeling of having outsmarted the crash.
While I put my laptop on recovery mode, I checked how much of the data was safe. I hooked up the drive to my desktop and my world collapsed. The external drive also had crashed!!! The format was unrecognised and windows could not make sense of what was connected. Having survived a few crashed earlier, I tried all the tricks that I could conjure, tried many recovery softwares, but no luck. Data gone forever. The most precious thing of what I lost was my collection of photographs from many Treks, family, funtions, Europe, Korea, get togethers, baby photographs....about 45 GB of memories vanished ...just like that :(
But after 2 days at it and a lot of jugaad , I could recover all of my photographs and some junk that I could have lived without. I was trying to revive my wireless parallely and that was accomplished too by adding a network switch. The whole setup looks stupid. But atleast I have internet access whenever I want.
My weekend was completely ruined. At the end of it all, I learnt a lot about hard disks, partitions and related stuff, a little bit about networking too, which might not be too useful. But the most imp lesson.. If it is important data...burn it on CD or DVD. As of now I've started uploading my photographs to piccassa....something I've been planning to do for a long time but could never find time. I hope I don't have to re-live these situations again.
Cheers!
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