Nothing foretold the pain and agony to come. No hints, no indications. When it happened, it was out of the blue.

I was sitting in my cube this afternoon chatting with one of my coworkers about a design approach. All of a sudden, my computer restarted itself. “How odd,” I thought. The computer posted, went through the Windows bootloader, and began to start Windows. As the black WinXP splash screen was being displayed, the screen briefly flashed to blue and the computer restarted again. This time, I interrupted the boot process to tell Windows to start in safe mode.

Blue screen: UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME.

The next time, I told it to launch the recovery console.

BSOD again.

Uh-oh.

A tech from the IT department came out and did a cursory check. He spoke the words I feared most: “Your drive is fried.” D’oh!

Most of my files are stored on a network drive, but all of my source code gets checked out to my local hard drive. I had a half-dozen files checked out that hadn’t been checked in for almost a day. A day’s work, up in smoke. Arg!!

On the upside, I’m not convinced that all is lost. There is evidence that the filesystem is hosed but that the drive is still somewhat functional. I’m going to go in early tomorrow and try my bag of tricks to recover it. If I am unsuccessful, it might be an early weekend for me, as a replacement drive wouldn’t be available until Monday. Oooohhh, I hope it works…