worst case scenario...

saturday was a dark day. i discovered that i could no longer read data from my 160 gb external fire wire drive, or more critically, i could no longer access my music files. yes, 12,892 music files, 51.3 gb's worth. still there, but gone. some critical files got corrupted, and that was that. after consulting with my main peep, jeffrey, he recommended that we boot from a knoppix cd (linux based file system) to try to get at the data. it appears the files are all still there and we will be able to recover the data. i'm not out of the woods completely yet, but i feel a lot better about it today than i did yesterday. i've used knoppix in the past at work (it's been awhile though) to recover data from corrupt or non-bootable systems and it's saved my bacon more than once. anyhow, a big shout out to jc for helping me dig out of this jam, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY monday :-) i'm buying a new hard drive this week and will be backing up my files on a regular basis going forward. you'd think that a tekkie like myself would have a disaster recovery plan (or in ITIL language- continuity management plan) but NO. as i have said before, i'm a moron. never again...thank goodness i still have the 40 gigger ipod to get me though this. more later...