Well, my machine crashed, yet again, on May 5th and it took the data on my storage drive with it.

For a few days I thought I had a virus in the bios, but after swapping drives and seeing the slave drive recognized by the bios as a slave, I knew that C-drive was toast (by the time I stopped trying to recover from the crash, it was screeching). The data on the storage drive was toast, too. Efforts to recover files on it have been completely unsuccessful.

Running Windows I expect to have to restore C-drive at least once a year. But the storage drive has been stable forever. The last time I backed it up was in December. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

My problems with this machine started when I installed Ubuntu and I'd like to blame the GRUB loader (an autoexecute file that lets me choose whether to boot Linux or Windows). But I think when I partitioned the drives I did a poor job.

So I'm trying Linux, Ubuntu flavor, and Windows again. But this time I think the partitions are set up right and for good measure I'm setting up the machine to mirror the drives to CD periodically.

Then comes reinstalling all the files, setting the desktop up the way I like it, and pulling what I can off this website. Recovery can be slow and losing the data drive threw me for a loop.

Should be back to blogging as usual by late Saturday. The new Moon chart for yesterday is done; it'll be published then.

Please, stay tuned.

--Marge