Really? Really???

[confusedoo]

Well, it appears that I've figured out why windows 7 was constantly fucking up and bluescreening... Apparently the hard drive was silently dying. I did a disk scan, and windows "fixed" a bunch of index errors. It then realized a rather vital chunk of the hard drive was apparently missing and wouldn't boot. After some freak out random hardware pulling, I was able to get things up and running off my old hard drive, which I thankfully left untouched with win xp still on it. I was able to get some of the data off the failing drive with no problem, but my mail folders are g-o-n-e gone. Not even a trace of thunderbird on the hard drive save for one pre-caching reference. A lot of the important things are still on a google server somewhere, but an equally significant number of emails were saved just to the hard drive and erased off the aol server.

I've got an uneraser-utility dutifully searching the disk in the background, but I can only presume 'shareware' means 'holding your data hostage till you pay'. Not 100% sure it's worth it for the aol mails. This is just the crowning achievement of tech-clusterfuck today. At work there was an unannounced patch that made it take 40 minutes for me to log in, then my phone died at noon, and I spent another hour trying to resuscitate the phone and log into a computer at an empty desk (suffering through the patch again).

This is just SO what I needed right now... < sarcasm > This fall has been stressful enough between book, school, work, and personal life.