So, about a month ago, Tom’s hard drive went kaput. No reason, just suddenly there was no information on it. So he lost almost 200GB of stuff. We bought a new hard drive and off he goes.

About a week ago, his computer flat out dies. He managed to resurrect it, only to discover that he has a bad motherboard (or videocard or something like that) and for now, it can run, but only in safe mode. We have added a new hard drive.

But get ready for the absolute WORST. My computer.

Last week, after dealing with his information loss, we decided to buy an external 300GB one-touch backup system for my computer. So the drive arrives and Tom installs the software. And my computer pretty much DIED.

Basically, the computer was not responding—you’d click on something to open it (i.e. Start) and nothing would happen…and a few minutes later, it would open. Hmmm. We tried uninstalling and it didn’t help. We tried reinstalling to uninstall and it didn’t help (and each of these attempts takes upward of a half hour, since everything is so sluggish). Safe Mode didn’t even help.

Maxtor support informed us that their software has conflicts installing on XP systems with the .NET framework. DO YOU THINK THEY MIGHT HAVE MADE A NOTE OF THIS SOMEWHERE???

Long story short, somwhow during the installation, the Maxtor program RENAMED my document directory (a separate hard drive) from D: My Files to D: Local Disk. When we tried to access the drive (to change the name back) …surprise! No data! A totally empty drive! Ready to be formatted!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

• I have lost every digital picture I have taken over the past five years (minus what few I have made into a DVD slideshow).
• I have lost tons of TV shows and movies.
• I have lost probably 100GB of music.
• I have lost the remaining Christmas gift calendars (feel lucky if you already got yours).
• I have lost my annual Christmas letter (which was to be printed and mailed out this weekend). I am NOT in the mood to recreate it, so I don’t think there will be one this year.
• I have lost who knows what else—as you know, my LIFE was on this computer.

Ironic, isn’t it, that in trying to install a backup system I erased everything I wanted to back up?

We downloaded some data recovery software last night and are in the process of trying to recoup anything. Of course, the process isn’t going smoothly—the first part should have been done by the time we got up, but it had stuck at 2%…Not Responding. GRRRR. The best case solution would have us extract the drive and hook it up to Tom’s working system in order to do the data recovery…but oh yes, remember his computer is on the fritz?!?

And to top it all off, Tom called Maxtor to see what they had to say/if they could do anything… and they had the #%^$ GALL to tell us that their software didn’t cause the data to be erased…reinstalling Windows did. Um, sorry, but I have to call bullshit on that one—the data was LONG GONE before we tried reinstalling Windows (which they apparently didn’t remember they TOLD us to do because their software failed).

At this point, I think I am still numb.