My hard drive crashed just before the New Year's party Kat and I threw. The timing for this was really poor because it meant that I was about to get drunk and enter 2008 fully aware of how stupid I was for not backing up the photos that I had taken and the music I had collected over the last 4 years.

So, I did some googling and came across the following solution: to boot from an Ubuntu Live CD, mount the bad hard drive, and copy the important files to an iPod. It appears to be working. Unfortunately, it seems like there are a few corrupted files here and there, but I've already recovered the vast majority of my photos and couldn't ask for more at this point.

Actually, I am hoping for Dell to speedily replace my bum hard drive, but that all depends on whether or not my computer came with at least a five year warranty.

Anyway, heed my cautionary tale. Back up your stuff. Hard drives suck.

Labels: crash, Dell, Hard Drive, iPod, linux, miscellaneous, recovery, Ubuntu