Windows = teh sux0r

All I wanted to do was watch an episode of South Park on my computer. Is that so wrong? It must be, because when I tried the whole computer hung while my hard disk made throat-clearing noises. I restarted to fix the problem, only to discover that Windows had lost an entire partition. My precious E: drive, that 60 gigabunnies of goodness where I store all my ill-gotten music and media in general, was nowhere to be found — well, Windows found it, but reported that it was 60 gigs of raw, unformatted disk, a sort of data which is dramatically less interesting to listen to with Winamp.

For those keeping track, this is my fourth serious disk failure the last two years.

Fortunately Microsoft makes a tool to correct this sort of error. It comes with Windows, but it’s not something you’ll find in the Start menu. I discovered it by searching the MSDN site, which for a programmer is the documentation-equivalent of wearing a blindfold and getting kicked repeatedly in the balls while trying to feel your way out of a barbed-wire maze. It’s that bad. I weep in sympathy for anyone who has to do Windows development and therefore use that mess. A non-programmer has not a prayer of gleaning any useful knowledge from those pages.

Anyway, I wanted my MP3s back badly enough to grope around on MSDN for a few minutes, and found this little utility called Chkdsk which does what it sounds like if you add vowels in the right place. Even though it’s completely inaccessible to the average computer user (you need to run a command window), it seems to work tolerably well. It’s been at 98% for a while now, and so far it looks like I only lost a couple British Sea Power mp3s and something off of Her Majesty The Decemberists. I still haven’t been able to watch South Park, since the video lives on that partition, but I have hope.

When will I learn my lesson and buy a back-up drive? Someday, maybe, but not tonight. Come on, you blighter, get to 99…