Hey, remember how back in March 2007 I bought a new hard drive to put my most important shit on? Well apparently if I had actually backed my data up onto it then, I wouldn’t have learned a lesson.

After months of non-use, I finally transported my computer over to my GF’s last night and on the trip, my computer came up with a hilarious joke to play on me: When I booted it, the primary hard drive wouldn’t spin up! Isn’t my computer hilarious? Oh man, good one, computer. Every single photo I’ve ever taken, everything I’ve ever created in Photoshop, all the music I’ve recorded (not other bands, MY stuff. Stuff that can’t just be re-downloaded) — I laughed like all night.

Oh, and my computer’s sense of comedic timing… get this: I had literally just ordered a new 1TB drive hours before so that I could transfer everything over to a new drive. That’s right, new drive in the mail, 3-5 business days away from saving all my data elsewhere and the primary drive fails. Brilliant. Oh, and get this! My computer also had a total of four hard drives to choose from: My MP3 drive (most of which is safe and sound on my iPod or, in the worst case, could be re-downloaded), my ROMs/ISOs drive (again, would suck to lose, but could all be redownloaded), and my “Secondary” drive, labeled as such mostly because it’s full of a bunch of random, useless shit. My computer’s so fucking funny. I imagine, just before booting up, my hard drives illuminating in a random sequence then, when I pushed the power button, the sequence stopped on my most crucial drive while an animated Whammy did a little jig across the bedroom and walked away with 3000 of my digital photos.

I did the standard “try turning it on three hundred times just in case I didn’t have it plugged in right the first two hundred ninety-nine times” trick to no avail. But there is hope. My “Secondary” drive is identical, having been purchased at the same time and, though I risk losing a complete US Dreamcast collection (it can be downloaded again), I’m going to try swapping the logic boards on them. I pray to science it works because, as we all know, data recovery is second only to plastic surgery in price and emotional investment. I’ll know by this afternoon…