Fate has a very wry sense of humour...

... and if this were Discworld, I'd wonder what She still held in store for me. This being Roundworld, what happened on Thursday evening only leaves me miffed, unhappy and not daring to be hopeful.

What are the chances, dear readers, that a harddrive fails right after it has managed to download the latest episode of Lost and you settle down comfortably to watch it?

What are the chances of this happening four days after the warranty of said harddrive ran out?

And - I swear I am not making this up - what are the chances of the only file remaining accessible on that drive being a particular mp3 file?
A song by Donovan. (Anyone remember the 70's?)
A song called "Atlantis"!

The continent of Atlantis was an island which lay before the
great flood
in the area we now call the Atlantic Ocean.
So great an area of land, that from her western shores
those beautiful sailors journeyed to the South and the North
Americas with ease,
in their ships with painted sails.
To the East Africa was a neighbour, across a short strait of sea
miles.
The great Egyptian age is but a remnant of The Atlantian
culture.
The antediluvian kings colonised the world
All the Gods who play in the mythological dramas
In all legends from all lands were from fair Atlantis.
Knowing her fate, Atlantis sent out ships to all corners of the
Earth.
On board were the Twelve:
The poet, the physician, the farmer, the scientist,
The magician and the other so-called Gods of our legends.
Though Gods they were -
And as the elders of our time choose to remain blind
Let us rejoice and let us sing and dance and ring in the new
Hail Atlantis!
(...)


That harddrive contained all files dear to me, including my photo collection.
A lot of it I have backed up on CD, and the concert pictures and videos I hadn't yet backed up I can get back from someone else. But a few will remain lost.
In lack of space to put any possibly salvaged data on (I won't be getting my hands on a new HD before Wednesday; I ordered one at the local electronics store; no more online computer hardware shopping for me...) I just ran the picture file half of a recovery program and did indeed get an unsorted mess of over 700 .jpeg, .gif, .doc, .txt and .mp3 files dumped onto my already laden original drive. The picture files I have absolutely no backup of don't seem to be among them. Some .mp3 files are empty or incomplete; we'll see what the other half of the recovery program can do once I have a drive to dump the data on.
The other odd thing is.... I removed "Atlantis" and put it on the original HD. After I had done that a "new" file popped into existence on the corrupted drive. I removed that as well, and another one popped up. It is shown as an empty folder (the content of which I don't really need anyway), so I tried to delete it - which my comp refused to do, telling me that the folder wasn't empty. (Yeah? So? That never kept you from deleting folders before, did it?) So there goes my "Hm, maybe I can coax more files into existence by moving every new one away" approach to the matter....

*sighs*

Me no happy.

If you hear a loud wailing noise reveberating around the world between Wednesday and Thursday that will be me. I do hope against hope though that I will have reason to cheer.... at least a little bit.

Keep your fingers crossed for me, friends.