SHITSHITSHIT!

[Magpie]

My work laptop just died. And I did two stupid things. The first one was not having a really recent backup. (I am fairly sure I know when that was, I have made some semi-major changes since then, but they turned out to not be necessary, the ones that were useful were all small ones, and I'm pretty sure I remember them.) The second one was not realising what the clicking noise meant, and running over to Jackdaw's office and grabbing the portable hard drive to do a backup before trying to reboot the computer. (It's an instinctive reaction: something's wrong, save and reboot).

ETA: nevermind, it works again, somehow. IT guy was very nice. I didn't get a single lecture (neither from him or from my supervisor) about not having backed up in the last month.

[draggar]

Clicking noise in a hard drive = very bad things are coming. Backup ASAP and replace the drive.

(Yes, there are some instances where clicking isn't bad - just a BIOS / driver issue but that's <1% of the time).

If it does happen and the drive is dead, get your IDE or SATA to USB converter out, stick the bad drive in a zip-lock back and put it in the freezer for an hour or two, take it out and try to get your data ASAP.

Hopefully your IT guy swapped the drive or at least ordered a replacement.

[Magpie]

I'm going to be much better about backups now that I've realised that 2GB is enough for me to backup all my research, and so I can do it on a SD card. It stopped clicking, I'll talk to my supervisor about potential replacement. It's not a new laptop though, so he might just want to let it die (I probably won't need Fortran much more, and I can re-install Visual Basic easily enough. Legally even.)