Friday, May 05, 2006

It always happens during Finals Week

It has been an interesting night. It's after 5 a.m. and I haven't been to bed yet. But I have a good reason.

Around 10:00 p.m., my friend Nick called and told me that his computer had died--the computer with his entire portfolio on it, including all of his projects for the semester. Understandably, he was upset. I have a computer that's very similar to his, and he wanted to come over and see if he could use my machine to somehow salvage the data on his hard drive. So I told him to come over.

After about two hours spent getting the hard drive hooked up and having my computer scan it, we still couldn't get into it to get at the files. I gave Nick the okay to download a file recovery demo program and let it scan the drive. The "quick" scan took about an hour and yielded few results. Then we set it to do a full scan. Meanwhile, we watched Ocean's Eleven, walked down to the parking lot by Hard Times to pick up one of my (intoxicated) roommates' cars while singing Irish drinking songs (no we didn't let him drive), and spend a good hour or more at Perkins. When we got back, the full scan was 90% done and had over 30,000 files that it could find and possibly recover. We let the scan finish (about another half hour) and spent some time browsing through what the program found. A good chunk of the files that Nick needs were there.

In order to recover the files, he has to actually purchase the program. It's a good deal compared to giving the drive to a data recovery company and paying them $700 to take care of it. So tomorrow, we're gonna get this thing all fixed up.

Nick says that phase one of paying me back is taking me out for dinner for my birthday. But to be honest, being able to take care of him while he was stressed out and seeing his relief at the possibility of getting the files back is reward enough for me (aw, how cliche!).

And now, I'm quite tired. Time for me to call off the vigil and head to bed. Despite being exhausted, I feel pretty good. Funny how that works.

No comments: