The system is down

Right off, I'm gonna say this: don't expect daily posts. I certainly don't. But yesterday, after meeting with my graduate advisor, I came back to my apartment to get some more work done. However, my laptop would not boot up. I've had tons of problems with the hard drive in the past, and I think it recurred while trying to boot. So, the system got pretty much screwed up. I went through my normal tricks to get it to at least boot, but none worked. Mind you, this hard drive contained the only copies of files which I've been working on for months toward my thesis project. (Not the paper itself, which doesn't yet exist, even in my imagination, but the project.)

Thankfully, I knew just what to do. I hooked up the hard drive in my desktop and recovered the files with some software I'd previously bought. Then, I put it back in my laptop and reformatted. Now, I'm reinstalling everything and determining what files I want to move back to the laptop. I'm actually somewhat grateful that I've had these problems in the past. I had the proper adapters and software, and I knew how to use them. If this were the first time this happened, I would be panicking. Really, really, really panicking.

Thankfully, the hardest part about all this is being patient. No, maybe it was trying to track down the disc with the tools I need. The school owns the software, so I had to go from professor to professor, student to student to find the disc. And I still failed. But I found a student with a copy of the programs on his computer, which was good enough.

The hardest part of this project so far has been getting everything working together. Let's see if I can remember how to set everything up again. Here's hoping.