I’m working my way through reinstalling everything.  I tried reconnecting the old broken drive so I could use some recovery utilities on it but any time it’s connected my computer bluescreensw with an ntfs.sys error, even if I’m already in windows and try plugging it in live (it’s SATA so it should theoretically work).

Warning, geekery follows:

I then tried rebooting to my XP CD so I could run a chkdsk on it to repair the broken ntfs.sys, but it actually freezes up when “inspecting your computer’s configuration”.  I get the same kind of freezeup when I boot to my utilities CD.  I was going to get it to wipe the MBR — my recovery utility doesn’t need that and it should bypass the ntfs.sys problems.

It looks like if I want the data from this drive I’m going to have to bring it to one of those professional drive recovery places and that’s going to cost me money I simply don’t have (eyes clients who are still late with payments…)

The thing is, though I had a lot of that drive backed up, a lot of things weren’t.  My email, my huge collection of Fonts (dating back from Corel 4.0 and a ton of favorites I’ve collected from the freeware versions on the web) as well as my iTunes music preferences.  I had almost two thousand songs rated, which makes it easier to make playlists, now that’ll be blank — the songs themselves were on a diferrent drive, however.

And then there’s the recent client data, mIRC scripts and logs, base artwork for several personal projects, some saved scripting code… ugh, it’s a mess.  Looks like debt is coming up soon.