Jeai-cArlos Cl. Tee

My sister told me that my four year old PC at home wasn’t booting up Windows XP. That’s just a few days before I went to visit home for holy week. Thinking that it was a Windows problem, I took home an installer and a CD ROM drive, since mine was broken.

I come home surprised to find that my hard disk had crashed!

Well, the drive had it coming. For years, I listened to it screech whenever I use the computer. A head crash was inevitable. There were only some projects that got saved when I burned them to a CD to bring them to Manila last year. It was a mistake not bothering to make a complete backup then. Now two years worth of programming, music collection, projects, installers and music are all gone.

This isn’t the first time that I lost so much data. The first time this happened to me was with my old PC, four years ago. It was an old second hand computer. After using it for two or three years, the hard disk crashed one night while programming something in C++. All my high school programming endeavors have been lost. The good thing about that happening is that I got to get my parents to buy me a new computer. Nice! :D

The second great data extinction happened three years ago and that time, it was my fault. Who knew tinkering with partitions can lead to your entire hard disk being erased? :S I was playing with Partition Magic and Windows/Linux partitions and then at some point, POOF!!! :O The partition table was gone! On top of that, I formatted the disk even before the thought of recovering my files entered my mine. Lesson learned. :(

And so, it happened again, for the third time. :( Anyways, I tried to recover the files but I didn’t have enough time to do it in that vacation. Basing from my past experience, this isn’t a one-click-and-wait-for-one-second task so I’ll do it on December on my next vacation. Hopefully the data are not totally lost then.