I’d like to inform you that Buster’s OK . . . more or less. It’ll take a bit to explain, so here’s the story. Sunday afternoon, I was reading manga comics on-line when I heard strange sounds. Mind you, I have absolutely hideous directional hearing, so I was having a lot of trouble pinpointing where the sounds were coming from. When they got louder, I realized that it was my computer. I immediately began shutting down programs but then decided simply holding down the power button would be faster. I put Buster back on his laptop stand and did something else for the rest of the afternoon. When Ian woke up, I informed him as to the clicking sounds coming from my laptop, and he took the hard drive out and put it in a couple plastic bags with a packet of desiccant (to prevent moisture getting to it) in the freezer for a while. Then he plugged it into his desktop and began running SpinRite, an awesome program that helps to restore damaged and corrupted hard drives when generally there is no hope. Mind you, this isn’t a 100% certainty as to retrieving lost data, but Ian has had lots of luck with it in the past. If he couldn’t get this to work, I would lose about 35k words in my fourth novel as well as a lot of images I had recently downloaded and a bunch of other minor documents and projects. Can we spell “suck?”

Luckily, Ian managed to get SpinRite to revive Buster enough to copy off the documents, images, and some other system information. In the meantime, he wiped and converted the hard drive from his own laptop into something usable for Buster. Now instead of a 60 gig hard drive, I have an 80 gig. Sure, I could have just used Ian’s laptop while waiting to save up enough for a new one for Buster, but well, I have need of a high sticker-to-computer ratio, remember? 😉 That and I’m used to Buster. He’s been my buddy for five or six years now. Not using him would be like not using my own phone for messaging and phone calls. Just weird.

So Buster’s up and running. We don’t yet know the fate of his old hard drive. When Ian was working with it to get my files off, it seemed to be running all right, but who knows for how long. We’re looking into on-line back-up sites for storage so we can keep off-site copies of things like the novels, but I’m leaning more toward simply burning it off to a CD and mailing a copy to Dad to keep in LGT. 😉 At any rate, I’ve gotta get stuff ready for crochet class tonight (we’re adding fingers to the gloves we started last week) and I think food is in order soon. I’m glad to be typing this up from Buster. I love my laptop!