Possibility of Hard Drive Failure -- First Time EVER

And if I weren't emotional enough right now, we are facing something that never, ever happened before to us since we bought our first computer (a Gateway desktop), back in 1998.

My old Dell laptop's operating system is failing and it is warning us to "Immediately back up your data and replace your hard drive because a failure is imminent."

As you know, I have a new laptop, but I have not had time to back up all the stuff in my old one (only my teaching files). There is not a whole lot of stuff there that I don't have backed up, but there is enough to make me really sad and pretty stressed out.

There are lots of photos from the trip to Brazil that were not downloaded anywhere else but on that computer. On the last day in Brazil I put some in my mom's computer, but not all. And I think I don't have all the photos from last year and this year backed up in the external hard drive.

I know, DUMB me!!

For practical purposes, though, (since photos only have emotional value) there are other things that I need right not and that are only in that computer and nowhere else -- the recent versions of my CV, some recent academic work and, a pretty annoying loss if it materializes, my translation into Portuguese of one of my published essays that I was going to submit tonight for publication in Brazil in an email that is mostly written and that just needed the attachments.

That's now I found out that there was something horribly wrong with the laptop. I had used it yesterday to show my friends some photos (from the external hard drive) and also all night from Thursday to Friday when I was preparing a conference presentation (it was an amazing conference last Friday, BTW).

Last night my youngest son was playing on it and he starting getting upset that it was crashing. This morning the same thing, and there was much screaming and complaining about the computer, but I was busy cleaning the kitchen, getting laundry out of the washer and hanging it outside, so I didn't go check what was wrong.

Then, when I needed to send the email to the journal editor in Brazil I finally picked up my red laptop and, lo and behold, there was this warning screen on it. What is it that people call it? The black screen of death or something?

I just needed to blog this. I know I've already written too many posts today, but I need to get this out there.

Have you lost a hard drive? What did you lose? How was it?

And I'm still in disbelief that this is finally happening to us. :(  We've had nearly crashing computers several times before, but before they crashed K backed them up and reinstalled the operating system, so we never had a problem. I know, very very lucky, 14 years without problems. There was bound to be a first time, no?

Sorry for the annoying post(s)!