Episode 465: Payback's A Bitch

If you believe in karma, today's events illustrate it perfectly. After an excellent (and somewhat productive) yesterday, today has been one disaster after another. It started with me waking up to discover that some episodes of Smallville hadn't downloaded properly. As a result, many duplicate files had been created on my external hard drive. I deleted them, thinking all would be fine, and for a while, it was. Until I realised that the thumbnail previews on all the videos were going wonky, which I've found is always a bad sign. Lo and behold, the hard drive went into meltdown. Since this was a logical rather than physical failure, I had some hope that I could resurrect the drive. Thus ensued an afternoon spent in unfruitful attempts to do just that. I managed to find free software that could retrieve the files. I even found something that claimed to be able to repair the partitions on the drive. Lies, all lies. The retrieved files were unplayable, and the partitions refused to be repaired. So just before I left for Jemma's party, in a desperate last attempt, I turned off my laptop and rebooted the hard drive. Hey presto, it's working again! While I'm glad for that, I'm also kicking myself for not thinking of it sooner. Apparently, unplugging wasn't enough because that's the very first thing that I tried. Sigh...