NP: FC Dallas vs. Real Salt Lake

Every time I get really close to finally fixing my hard drive problem once and for all, something goes horribly, horribly wrong. I had picked up a trial version of a program that did a better job of making an exact copy of my C: drive than Ghost. The test run on Tuesday or Wednesday seemed to work fine, except for two things. First, it was a couple of days past my last backup, and second, there was ONE bad sector on the disk that I had the program ignore.

So yesterday, to address both of these, I figured I would find a program that actually fixes -- rather than "hides," if I understand what happens with disk utilities correctly -- bad sectors. Before I messed with that, though, I wanted to run a new backup.

It was all going to work fine. Backup the drive. Fix the bad sector. Copy the disk. Replace the old disk that's been giving me so much trouble with the brand new one. Easy, right?

Of course not. Somewhere during the backup process, the old hard drive got worse, to the point of being unreadable. So I had two choices. Try to restore from the Ghost backup, which had crapped out at 90% every time I tried it and was only current as of Sunday, or swap out the drive for the new one with the bad sector copied, which was only current as of about Tuesday.

For some reason I don't quite understand, I picked the former, despite the fact that (a) it didn't work when I tried restoring the backup to the new drive instead of the old and (b) the latter approach would have gotten me a more current version of my hard drive.

Now, there's something about recovery environments -- the system that you get when you start from a recovery CD-ROM -- and that's that your drive letters get scrambled. So your C: drive might not show up as your C: drive. As it happens, my system has three drives. There's a 160GB internal drive, which is the one that was pissing me off. There's a 160GB external drive, which is where all my MP3 files live. And there's the 320GB drive I use as my backup.

It's also important for this story to know that I decided not to back up the MP3 drive because there wasn't enough space to run the backup for both, and with the C: drive crapping out on me, I was focused on taking care of that.

Do you see where this is going?

I start the restore process,and go about my business. Later, I look at the system, and notice that the lights on both external drives are blinking, meaning both of them are in use. Both of them are in use? That can't be right, as I'm restoring to the other..oh, fuck.

All my MP3s and iTunes files. Gone. Period. I don't traffic in illegal downloads very much at all, but there was a fairly huge chunk from eMusic from back when I worked for them and they had the unlimited download program, and I doubt I can get those back. I've heard anecdotal evidence that I might be able to re-download files I've purchased from Apple, but we'll see. And I may be able to salvage a chunk of tunes off my iPod.

I'm tempted to use half of my tax return to have someone re-rip my 1,000 CDs for me, because i was all the way down to 'S'.

I could be more upset about this, but it was my own damn fault, and there's nothing I can do about it other than figure out how to reacquire the songs one way or the other.

But the lesson here is, if you have multiple hard drives, make them different sizes so you can tell the difference if the drive letters get mixed up. And back up ALL your drives, duh.