Back!

[balinares]

Without fanfare but with much glee, I'm back from my leave of absence, which consisted mostly of one week in the Caribbeans at unblue's place in between two weeks of dealing with a dead hard drive. I'll touch upon the Caribbeans adventure later on.

In the meanwhile, the latest update on hard drive news is that, yes, it's indeed completely, utterly dead.

But I still managed, after a good two weeks of complicated work that involved some truly crazy black magic, to recover about every file that mattered. I'm not done reviewing all the files to make sure they're sound and good, but so far, and despite the bitterly amusing amount of things that went wrong in the meanwhile, everything looks fine. Holy poodle on a tricycle.

If people are interested, I might write a post on how I went about it, in case others may have use of it.

Other than that, I'm in a sort of thoughtful mood these last few days, which I may go into later on if I get around to it; but someone -- you know who you are ♥ -- kindly called me an "emotional millionaire" this evening, which makes me feel warm and fluttery inside and I'll go to bed happy. :)

Comments

[kefen.livejournal.com]

Actually I'm curious as to how you managed to salvage your data. I've had to deal with minor HD failures but I'm pretty sure your experience in the matter will come in very handy someday!

(And yay for recovery, too, 'cos losing important files is Sad(tm) too.)

[grey-wolf-xvii.livejournal.com]

Good old fashioned hard work! A magnetic needle, a magnetometer, and some paper to translate the datas!

[balinares.livejournal.com]

Back when I was in engineering school, my next door neighbour was a student in the same year as me; his legend had it that he could intercept TCP packets just by sniffing the CAT-5 cable.
I've never seen fit to refute that legend. Those exist for a reason. :)

[balinares.livejournal.com]

Well, the process was, in truth, pretty specific to the precise context of my woes -- where some bits could still be extracted from the disk at the beginning, and the targetted filesystem was ReiserFS -- but hopefully there will still be helpful bits in there for others. :)

[hirolynx.livejournal.com]

"Holy poodle on a tricycle."

Do you, as unblue does, master the art of making incredibly funny personnal expressions? :3

As a sidenote, i would also appreciate knowing what kind of spells, prayers, incantation and summoned daemons you used to achieve your data recovery, since i am going to do it myself in little time. Thankies!

[balinares.livejournal.com]

Hee, no, I'm nowhere near as good at him. :) I used to name my variables "enclume" a lot though. The word 'enclume' is, somehow, inherently fun. Like poodles.

Also, okay, I'll try to document what I did, although, as I told Kef further up, the process may or may not apply in a different context than that of my problem. Might still help though. :)