The Hard Drive Crash saga

As many of you know, my hard drive crashed. A friend suggested I should blog my story, so here's the story in its entirety.

Feb 11th - I was trying to do my statistics homework, which required SPSS. I launched SPSS, but nothing happened. I tried a couple more times and nothing happened. Thinking that it was just a Windows hiccup, I restarted my computer. To my amazement, my computer never came back after that. At first I thought it was just a minor glitch and I needed to run checkdisk. However, Microsoft and its infinite wisdom required the administrator password - which, I of course, could not remember.

Feb 12th - An IT friend made me a disk to crack the admin password. I get the password and run checkdisk. Bad news - there's an unrecoverable error. To find out if it's the physical drive or a software issue, I run a hard drive health checker. Bad news again - it's the hard drive.

Feb 16th - I pass the hard drive off to another IT friend for an official assessment. Come to find out that at this point, Windows will not recognize the drive when it's set to slave. He tells me to run SpinRite and that if that doesn't work, then I'll have to send the drive off to a professional recovery company.

Current status: I don't remember exactly when I started running SpinRite, but I know it's been going 24 hours a day for a couple of weeks now. I'm hoping that this software will work miracles so I can recover the data and chuck this drive in a lake somewhere. (For the curious, it's a 6-7 year old Maxtor, 40 gigs.) I have already purchased a new drive and a back up drive and I'm just ready to move on. I'm lucky that I have my work laptop to keep me a float while I sort out my hard drive issues.

Lesson learned: back up back up back up. It's just not worth the stress, the time, and the money to recover the data.