A hard lesson

I declare that my laptop's hard disk passed away after serving me for the last two years. I had it tortured day and night (I never let the computer go into sleep mode so it always ran 24/7). Finally, it couldn't take it and took all my data on it to its grave as revenge. I feel sorry for the little fella but I am even more sorry for my losing all those precious financial data, personal notes, and pictures. I went to a repair shop this afternoon but the owner had left the store for an on-site order and the store therefore was closed. I strolled around the plaza and went into a restaurant for lunch. Two hours after, the store was still closed. There was no sign of the owner. After making some calls, I found out that I picked the wrong day coming to the repair shop; the owner wouldn't come back for the day. I was told to come again in the Tuesday afternoon. Anyhow, I wasn't mad because I was the one begging for service there. On my way back to seek other venues, I missed a turn and set myself to the wrong path. However, I immediately spotted another PC repair store. And this store was open. Originally I planned to go to the former store because I thought that a friend who recently went there got decent service and that the repair guy sounded like he knew his stuff. More importantly, he could easily persuade my friend into paying for a lot of unneeded services but he obviously didn't. But since I didn't achieve what I had originally planned to during this visit, I might as well listen to what another repair guy might say. The latter store looked a bit groomy (but all one-man repair shop look just like that). However the owner was eager to have my business. He was willing to let me take out my laptop and show him the error I got on it during boot-up. I already knew there could only be two kinds of causes with this: a dead hard disk or a faulty disk controller. I hoped much that the cause would be the latter, so that the data on my hard disk could still be intact. He suggested that I fill up a form and leave my computer with him and see what he might be able to do. He asked me for the password of the administrator's account. I didn't really care whether I could boot into the partition on the harddrive again. What I cared about was the data on the disk. And one doesn't need the administrator's password to access the data on the disk. Rather, one may access the data by hooking up the disk with another computer as a secondary hard disk. It wasn't like I didn't believe in that guy, but it was obvious to me that this wasn't something he could really fix. Yes, he could replace the hard disk easily (I could too). I was secretly hoping that this whole issue was just about a loose cable as in my friend's case. But I hadn't dropped my laptop onto the floor. In fact, the hard disk issue happened when the laptop was peacefully sitting on my desk. A cable wouldn't get loose for no reason, would it? I explained to the store owner that I wasn't much concerned about the computer. I only concerned about the data on the disk. He understood me and kindly suggested me to bring home an enclosure for the laptop hard disk and try it out on another computer (as I have mentioned above). Maybe he knew I knew enough so he didn't try to trick me into anything. No matter what, he didn't. I got home with a $29.99 hard disk enclosure, took the time to unscrew my laptop and hooked everything up to my snail-slow free desktop that I grabbed from the very same friend. I reluntantly signed the dealth certificate of my hard disk. It took all my valuable data with it. I may consider the expensive data recovery service. But frankly I no longer need to rush to that, because a dead hard disk is still a dead hard disk in a month or a year. Except for the financial records that need to be updated in three months because the banks keep only three-month worth of data online and accessible via financial software. In the meantime, I am learning to live without the stuff I have kept for so many years. Maybe, just maybe, it's a lesson that my Heavenly Father wanted me to learn. Now that I have revived my desktop, I can use it to check emails from work and even connect to the computers in my office. I am already contented.

But let's wait and see what'd happen when I eventually need the data I've lost...