Disappointments, Time Wasted and Silver Lining

Yesterday was a good day. I worked on my new layout for almost 10 hours and was very happy with the progress I was making. I then took a break to go chill with my mom at the nursing home and caught whatever little fireworks I could, especially since we got rained out.

I came back home and worked a little more until I started to get sleepy. I saved my file, but then my system froze. “No big deal”, I thought to myself. I then did a forced restart and went to bed.

This morning, I was up by 8am and ready to get back to work. I did my lil morning routine, got myself some grapes and checked my emails. Then I fired up Photoshop and was ready to go. I open up my file, only to see a black page with red stuff on it, no layers to be found.

“This must be some kind of error,” I thought. So I restarted Photoshop, but still the same deal. I did a lil searching around in Google only to find out that others have experienced the same thing before, and that my file got corrupted. After trying many PSD recovery software, I came to the conclusion that my work may be lost forever.

I then decided that it was time to do a disk check. This caused some issues at first, but I was finally able to run it. Unfortunately when it got to stage 5 of 5, I got a “Hard Fail”. I then did a Bios diagnostic test and that also failed. To make a long story short, my hard drive is dying. I am just grateful I caught it in time.

Between this morning and now, I can honestly say that I experienced the 5 stages of death, but in this case it is the slow death of my hard drive:

  1. Denial – For 2 hours straight I was in a state of denial that my file may actually be corrupted and was hell bent on correcting the problem.
  2. Anger – This is when it got really interesting. I came really close to throwing my laptop across the room at least 10 times today. Really close.
  3. Bargaining – I then prayed that God would work a miracle and fix my file. I promised that I would create a back up in case this should ever happen again. No such luck.
  4. Depression – I then got really sad. I am still really sad.
  5. Acceptance – I finally accepted that this kind of stuff happens. At least I can say I learned something from all this – to always back up my work files on a separate drive. Silver lining in the cloud? Maybe.

    I then proceeded to back up my files on an external hard drive and called the warranty company to ask them to send a box. The tech guy was annoying and kept asking if I did a recovery. I had to help him understand that I was almost certain that my issue was more of a hardware issue rather then a software problem. He eventually saw it my way and my box is in the mail.

So the moral to the story is: Get other people to do design work for you so that you don’t have to deal with this BS. No Seriously, please learn from my mistake and keep a backup of your work files on a separate hard drive. Ok?

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6 comments

Silver Bullion September 29, 2008 - 9:52 pm
That kind of thing happens all the time I am really surprised you didn't save it to an external drive, but lesson learned I guess.
nicole July 21, 2008 - 1:12 pm
Gosh that sucks :( I hate when stuff like that happens - not that I am able to do what you tried to do,....but I know what you mean !
Natasha July 8, 2008 - 10:06 pm
Hi Gary, welcome and thanks for stopping by. Yes, I have every intention of redoing the layout myself and will strive to make the new one even better then before. thanks again. :)
Gary July 8, 2008 - 8:37 pm
Sorry to hear of your bad luck - this sort of thing happens every so often at my job. For whatever reason my laptop enjoys freezing when I have several documents open and have forgotten to save recently. Good luck on a new layout - hopefully you decide to make one yourself. :) Garys last blog post..Photo of the Week - No. 14
Natasha July 5, 2008 - 11:51 pm
It's funny because just yesterday I was thinking to myself that the only difference between humans and other animals is our ability to reason as apposed to simply acting on instinct. I think this afternoon was one of those times where reason took over. If I had thrown my HP across the room, as my instincts suggested, I would have also destroyed my 256mb graphics card that it comes with. I would have been left with my little ibook that has only a 32mb graphics card. That would mean no more Second Life or any 3d online games. We simply can't have that... not yet anyways.
A Voice From the Battlefield July 5, 2008 - 11:33 pm
Aw man Natasha! I was so looking forward to checking it out on Monday. I was even going to try and convince you to give me a sneak peek. Ah well, I'm glad you got your head together. I know how these things frustrate you. It would have drove me crazy too. To be honest, I'd probably still be picking up small pieces of my PC. A Voice From the Battlefields last blog post..Old School Vs. New School Round 1: The Soul Train Line
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