well, the data drive is now mounting after a chkdsk. thankfully. the data is there and completely safe. i'm going to need to back a few things up more carefully. i should have done that some time ago, really. but windows 7 doesn't like my external hds (there's no reason for this, btw, it seems like a corporate side deal - the drive works perfectly fine in xp and even vista). so i'll have to wait until it gets back up.

the os drive got wiped in the attempted reinstall. i should have known that was going to happen. i did vista support. they taught us that. but note that xp wouldn't have wiped the drive like that, and i'm still in an xp world. i still have xp running on all my pcs and would honestly install it on the laptops if the bios would allow it (that's some fucking proprietary bullshit, but you take what you get with free laptops). there are reasons they switched to an image-based install, and some of them make good sense, but they should have retained the functionality of a straight-over reinstall. this is why windows users fucking hate macs. give me back my user control! let me install what i want! how i want! and, ultimately, the start-up utility failed, guys. you'll point to that as a reason to move to image-based installs without losing the benefit of a copy over reinstall, but it didn't work. i would have been nice to not lose the entire partition.

but i'll blame myself. i was being impatient, and impulsive. i should have known that was going to happen...

regardless, it wiped the partition table, so i had no option but to reformat it. and the chkdsk is running quickly through the "empty" drive. meaning my initial intuition of a fucked file system (rather than a fucked drive) seems to have been correct.

if i'm lucky, i might be able to salvage the open tabs by running restoration programs. formats don't delete data. it might still be accessible. and that's actually all i've lost. it's substantial, though: hundreds of tabs. articles. records. more than that, just flat out ordered tasks. everything else is on the data drive. now, how to get a fresh install of firefox to load that information is another question, and is going to be an experiment. i don't know the answer to this. i know the information is stored somewhere on the drive rather than solely in ram, but how to salvage it i don't know. let's hope i can get it at all to start off with....

overall, though, it's more of an annoyance than a catastrophe. lucky. i still don't know how it happened. i'm starting to suspect a power surge, though. i didn't think anything of it at the time, but i had just popped an sd card into the machine when it fizzed out on me. could the static have shorted it?