Rising from the ashes, and rising Ashes

Written on 2008.04.24

Finsihed my 18-22 leisure trip and came back to HK on Tue night.
It's a pleasant trip, both content wise and logistics.
Surprisingly convenient to travel between HK and Shenzhen Airport.

Worked till 3am+ on Wed morning.
Shut down the machine.
And it didn't boot properly in the morning.
Blue screen...
Tried several times...
No luck...
Call deskside support...
No luck...
Restore boot file...
No luck...
Attempted to copy the files back...
Couldn't recognize the drive...
Quite hopeless...
Planned long ago to buy another HDD.
So I went out to Wanchai and got one (and another for MM, who said Tiger should pay for it; Hitachi 160GB @$510 w/o case).
Installed image on the new HDD.
Still unable to copy data out from the old HDD.

I used to bought some data recovery s/w after my Italy trip (for disk failure, again).
But then the s/w & license keys are in the old HDD, not working!!!

Tried again on the web.
And found 1 good trial version.
Another colleague had the full version at home.
So it worked...
And I asked him to pass me last nite (Wed).

But then
When I went back home...
I didnt have access to my broadband...
I didn't keep the password
The password is kept my company mail file
And I didnt have key file (which was on the bad HDD)...

So what can i do?
Ah... I found that I still have woo's subnotebook...
I didnt recall the windows pwd exactly
But i tried severa times and got it
It connected to my broadband...
And then had MSN...
So this was the minimum config I needed to get the program from my colleague

And I managed to get back the bad files from the HDD...

I am still re-installing my stuffs, restoring data etc.
But it's fine...
Just a matter of time...

Seems like I need to have discipline on backup... :)