I finally got my hard drive back. Well, ok, I got it back about a week and a half ago, so this is a little anti-climactic. But still . . .

They managed to recover all my pictures and videos, but that was about it. I'm not sure what took so long (2 weeks in the shop) but they only got about 30 GB of data. They kept telling me they were having problems because the amount of recoverable data on my hard drive was more than the size of the hard drive they used to recover data to. I think they told me they had recovered 190 GB of data. But when I got it back there was no where anything close to 100 GB of stuff, never mind 190.

But no biggie. The pics and videos were the only truly unrecoverable material, so I'm thankful for that. I can recover my music from my iPod or re-rip my cd's, which I'm currently working on. And although I lost a lot of useful documents, I don't think I lost anything earth shattering.

So all in all, a successful operation. Now it's down to the task of reconstituting a useful computer. On the other hand, after I got my computer back the muffler on my car decided to go. So once I get that fized, we'll see what has to be replaced next. Thank goodness for emergency savings, eh?