id like to log these other recent events just for reference:

deer

just a week or so ago i hit a deer on the way to a martial arts seminar.. you can find the whole story here along with a bunch of photos of it.

laptop partition

just yesterday i royally fucked my laptops harddrive.. well not the whole drive.. just one partition. i was trying to merge it with another one.. partition magic wouldnt do it while i was in windows. i kept getting "error 11019".. which translates to:

C:\Documents and Settings\god>net helpmsg 1019

System could not allocate the required space in a registry log.

blah blah blah... google answers had one entry with a rather long response, but it didnt help me too much. i dont have a floppy drive on my laptop so i cant exactly boot easily off of a rescue disk.
so i have a cd bootdisk with all the partition magic stuff on it. .. i try it figuring something would probably go wrong, but it would tell me before it fucked anything up. i also thought that since windows wasnt running that it might work this time.. windows is always known for not letting you do things with it when the OS is running.
so i ran it.. it worked.. took a long time to "merege the partitions".. maybe an hour or so.. i wasnt really timing it.. anyway. ended up ALMOST completing.. then at the end it told me "error #7somethingouhsoetnuhs" i dunno what the error was now.. i dont really care.. anyway.. booted to windows thinking "oh shit" the entire time.. and oh shit was right. i open explorer to take a look.. usually i can see three local disks: c,d,e. this time i saw just c and d. E is the drive i keep all my personal files on and client stuff, photos, books, downloads.etc etc.. basically the one partition i really wouldnt want to fuck up because everything in it is irreplacable..unlike the other two partitions which are just the operating system and programs i use.
so. problem. nothings there.. windows computer management and partition magic both told me it was just a bunch of unformatted free space. at that point i basically realized that i had pretty much lost everything.

of course.. something in my head now clicked and i heard that old "data never really gets deleted". lots of programs out there for recovering lost or deleted data. lost data being my data, deleted being just deleting it via windows.. recycle bin.. empty.. what have you. my partition had also been reformatted back to ntfs by this point. i was sure i wasnt going to get anything back.

first program i tried was recover my files. really easy to use..kinda strange how it works though.. not much documentation.. not very good documentatiotn. didnt take long to find out that maybe i was in luck and i might be able to get back quite a bit of what i had though. in the end this program: 1. showed me that i could probably still get my files back 2. froze on me everytime i tried to get them back.

so on to the next step.. find out why its freezing. so i looked around a bunch.. google groups... found one post where someone had the same problem and somebody recommended a program called "getbackdata". turns out it was a typo.

GetDataBack is an extremely unrefined, generic-looking program (mmmmm i love it) with a decent user interface and is easy to use ONLY if you know what you're doing and what it's talking about. i place this program on a level between friendly wysiwyg GUI stuff and straight commandline. itll show you what you need to do in a decent readable format and you dont have to know any special commands from memory or through having to read documentation, but it's not exactly the easiest thing to understand. then again, if you've made it to the point that i did with fucking up my drive you probably know at least a little bit about what you're doing.

so anyway.. i run it a few times.. it shows me all my files.. but when i check to make sure that they're ok.. they're not. its just a bunch of files with the right file names, but they're all corrupted.. datas all in the wrong place. i looked at one of my jpg files in an editor and saw part of a paper i had written on the pledge of allegiance inside of it. .. clearly this wasn't working. i did it a couple more times.. played with the different results... nothing. so what to do. of course. RTFM

and i did. man.. incredible documentation. there's one whole page telling you exactly what to do, how to do it, etc... very detailed about every inch of the program. its a pity this all-important page was hidden inside the help file a few pages in. you would think that they would put this right in a sidebar somewhere while youre running the program. anyway.. read that.. tried it again.. tried a few different things.. finally got it. i got EVERY_SINGLE_FILE back. it was incredible. directory structure was fucked.. some directory names were missing.. a few files were in the wrong places.. im still putting things back in order.. but the point is that it WORKED and i got my shit back. so.. thumbs up to GetDataBack. i had to transfer all the files i wanted to recover to a different drive (so this is not a good program to use if you don't have enough room anywhere to put your stuff) and then transfer it back. if you ever fuck your shit up i highly recommend you try GetDataBack.