So this morning I was at the daily meeting we have at work. I had my work laptop open and had booked a meeting relevant to some stuff being discussed, I was looking at my to do list for the day, and OK, maybe during some of the slow parts of the meeting I snuck a peak at a news site. But then one of the people was giving a presentation on what they had been working on, so I closed the laptop and paid attention to the presentation.

About mid-way through, my laptop gave off a loud, completely unexpected BEEP. Well, at the end of the presentation I opened it up, and it was showing an angry error about not finding the hard drive. And then it just generally wouldn’t start. Kept cycling through the initial start up, but never actually starting up.

Sure enough, initial suspicions were confirmed a couple hours later by the guy here who deals with this sort of thing:

Your HD is bad. They are shipping a new one. You will have a new hard drive, OS, and software installed by the end of the week. Probably fully functional end of day Friday. Let me know if you need another computer to use in the mean time. […] You also might want to put together a list of the programs you will need installed on the laptop when I rebuild it, and then send the list to me when it’s complete. […] Sorry there was nothing I could do to recover the hard drive.

Yes, indeed. Dead hard drive. Lost everything that wasn’t already copied onto the network. All of the important finished documents were copied onto our document library, but works in progress, my email archive for work, all that fun stuff, all gone.

Luckily, unlike last time when I lost important things like emails back and forth between my friends as they insult and tease each other, this time it was just work stuff, so nothing important. I’m not really that concerned, although it still sucks.

I am however waiting for a third important hard drive in my life to fail. I’ll be double checking all my backups tonight.