So apparently it was the hard drive. In a very large way. I did some backups and it died so much that there isn't even a startup screen or a c prompt or anything except the words "error drive not found" or some such reassuring thing.
It took Ben's computer hours to scan the drive for errors remotely because there were so many errors to compile for the list. If I'd run the scan it could have taken days because I don't know what I'm doing with computers most of the time, but Ben knows what he's doing and was a bit appalled at the state of my hard drive.
And to put the cherry on top with a bit of flair. . .
all that backing up I was so good about...
apparently I don't know how to appropriately back up a drive.
Ben told me that my "backup" isn't really a backup since I failed to copy some particular thing for the files when I did my "backups". I sort of shut down after hearing that and don't really know what I did wrong. I didn't absorb anything beyond the fact that I lost all my data.
It's been months and I'm so glad to have a computer to work on again.
I miss my old one. It was slow and cranky and old, but we had some good times.
Maybe some day I'll get the pictures off the drive.
If any of you have pictures of Stella please send them my way. Send me an email and I'll forward you my snapfish info so you can load them on there. All the ones I had on the drive and hadn't gotten around to copying to snapfish are gone gone gone...that makes me sad. There were sooo many on there to be copied over.
Honestly I'm hoping Ben's wrong about the hard drive. Keep your fingers crossed for me.
