I got a call from Best Buy's Geek Squad earlier this evening, after the NARN show was over. I had asked them to retrieve the data from my dead laptop's hard drive, a service they provide for a fairly reasonable fee regardless of the condition of the drive. They have two tiers for the service: $99 for up to 9 GB of disk space, and $159 for unlimited retrieval. I chose the second, and it turned out to be the right call. The Geek Squad got 43 GB of data off my hard drive, everything I had before the crash. They had asked me to bring my new laptop into the store to transfer the data rather than burn a bunch of DVDs, and the data is now safely on my new system. I'm very pleased with their responsiveness and the fact that all of my data came through cleanly.

Once we determined that the hard drive was undamaged, I bought an enclosure for it, an Adaptec device that allows me to use it as a USB external hard drive. It only costs $26 and is simple to assemble. It even comes with its own handy carrying case and a Y-cable that allows me to attach it without losing a USB port.

I'm in the process of restoring my old e-mail in a separate profile setting. That will take a little work, even in Thunderbird, but the files still exist and I expect to retrieve everything by the end of the weekend. If you've sent a request for the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, that is part of the data I'm trying to restore. Feel free to resend your requests, but please use "101st Fighting Keyboarders" as the subject line. I'm going to try to get them all anyway.

Now to reload all of the programs ...

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