80+ hours of anxiety

My hard drive crashed yesterday afternoon.

I was trying to launch Photoshop, but it wouldn’t start, so I decided to reboot – something that usually sets things right.

But when I rebooted, the system couldn’t see the hard drive.

Hoping that the problem is just a matter of corrupted data, I tracked down my copy of SpinRite 6.0, set the system to boot from a CD drive and put it to work.

Since we’re dealing with a 1 terabyte hard drive, I expected SpinRite would take several hours to work its way through the drive finding bad sectors and rescuing data. Turns out it’s a job that will take more than 80 hours. That means it won’t be done until sometime Thursday evening.

Oh, well, if that’s what it takes to rescue my photos and other documents, so be it. SpinRite has saved my bacon several times in the years I’ve owned a copy and the $89 pricetag is more than reasonable for such a powerful computer tool.

In the meantime, I have my netbook.

You can check out SpinRite here.