Restoration, Resurrection, Rebirth, Phoenix from the flames... call it what you will... but it happened.

Exactly 5 days ago I somehow managed to crash the 'C' drive partition of my hard drive. Needless to say I panicked. I spoke with family and got some great advice (thanks Jon, James, and Tim), got a great deal of sympathy from friends (thanks Chadwick), and got some winning tips from a you tube video, and in the end my confidence was bolstered to the point of charging back at the bull. You see, If my hard drive was lost, all of our Christmas pictures would be lost. If you don't think that's scary, then you tell Sarah that her memories have been erased.

Anyway, long story short, I did it. It only took two trips to Fry's Electronics in Wilsonville, two hard drive trades, one hard drive enclosure, a cheap piece of data recovery software, a new Vista license, two tanks of gas, and the last 5 hours of my life and I was able to recover my entire broken hard drive. I am just lucky that there are people out there who have come up with the lifesavers for those of us idiots that have never "gotten around to" backing up our stuff.

I'll explain the two trips to Wilsonville. After Eugene and Springfield had failed me in every way possible with regard to my electronic needs, I packed up the family and we hit the road. 90 miles later I bought a SATA hard drive to replace the broken one and a hard drive enclosure for the recovery of the broken one. I then thought I might have an IDE hard drive, so I walked back into the store and traded the drive and the enclosure for their IDE counter parts. We then drove 90 miles back home only to find out that I do indeed have a SATA drive. This morning I packed the family back up in the car and we drove back to Wilsonville. I got what I needed, and that is that.

Addendum: I now have an external HDD and have my computer set for a weekly Sunday backup party. Everyone's invited!!!!