A while ago, my computer started having kernel panics whenever I’d do something pressing, like recording audio or editing big image files. Bad news. And then, about a month ago, as I was getting up from my desk a little too quickly, my foot got tangled with a firewire cord from my computer to an external drive. As I tried to leave the room, the drive flew off the shelf and landed on the floor squarely on its bottom, running and connected the whole time. Talk about your life flashing before your eyes…

Both my computer and that drive have seemed fine until this weekend, when they both apparently decided to throw me a party. I had two kernel panics in a row and then my computer wouldn’t restart at all - no RAM beeps, no noise, nothing. My (flying) drive was connected and running through the panics, and so now I had to just shut it off while it was spinning.

After connecting my drive to another computer I find that one of the partitions is damaged. After almost a month, all of a sudden a kernel panic damages a partition on an external firewire drive? I don’t know enough about computers to evaluate this. So - unless I’m interested in paying exorbitant recovery fees, I’ve lost about 50 gigs of photo and video.

This is terrible horrible awful and shitty. And the idiotic way in which I’ve “organized” my files means that there may or may not be backups on another drive.

Thank goodness for partioning - if it weren’t for that, I might not have anything right now! I’m backing up to DVDs tomorrow.