>The last full week in March was spring break at my kids’ school. We weren’t planning on doing anything special, but my son had other plans. When we moved to Indianapolis in 2005, we were introduced to the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. We went there in March of 2007 (during spring break) and bought a family Membership, which lasts for 12 months from the date of purchase. We decided that buying the family membership would be cost effective since we could go that year, and then go the next year right before the membership expired, basically getting two years for the price of one. So we went in 2007, and then again in 2008 before it expired (on spring break). The week before spring break our son asked us what day we were going to the museum. We hadn’t planned on it (actually, we forgot the original plan), but after researching, there were several exhibits that interested us, so we decided to go. We had a good time, and my oldest daughter didn’t throw up this time due to a vasovagal syncopal episode (that’s a story I’ll have to tell sometime, but not when she’s around).

We drove home after a good day at the museum. At some point that evening I turned on the computer, and it clicked at me. Not good. I restarted it, and it got to the “Windows XP” screen, and didn’t go any farther. Windows wasn’t loading. Then I started hearing the click of death. I restarted it about ten times, each time praying that it would work. I tried restoring the system. Didn’t work. Using my kids’ computer, I did some research and then tried another trick that a website suggested (download a copy of Puppy Linux, boot it from the CD, and then try to access the files on the hard drive). Didn’t work. I went to an electronics store and bought a USB hard drive docking station, hoping that maybe if I could access the drive when it wasn’t hot, that it would work long enough for me to get my files off the computer. Didn’t work. I declined to stick the drive in the freezer, since a few websites said that trick doesn’t work if the “click of death” is present.

So my hard drive, which was almost three years old, is now dead. I have an external hard drive that I bought for backup purposes in August of 2006. Some of my important files (music, money records, documents, etc) were backed up at the beginning of March. But the last time I backed up my photos was…..you guessed it, August of 2006. That is the bad news about this whole episode. We have lost almost every single picture that we took between September 2006 and August 2008 (our SD card in our camera is so big, we hadn’t deleted the photos since July 2008). Two years of photos are gone. At least we still have the memories. I do have the option of sending the hard drive to a recovery service, paying them anywhere from $500 to $2000 with no guarantee of recovering anything. No thanks.

I got a new hard drive, and used the recovery disks to reload everything. After a few days of deleting useless stuff and re-installing my programs, I basically have a new computer. And I am using my backup hard drive regularly. Lesson learned.