computers hate me

So today I was using my desktop, and the screen froze, and the tower started making clunking noises.

"Huh," I thought, "That sounds like a hard drive failing. But that can't be possible, because this machine is only about 8 months old. And I paid a lot for it."

Try to reboot, ten seconds into windows, clunking noise again. Blue screen of death.

Shit. Bad hard drive, for sure. And I haven't backed up my stuff for months. All my email, all my pictures, my taxes, you name it. Shit shit shit.

So I try to reboot the machine, and start grabbing things off of it before it can die. No good, Windows doesn't like bad disks, it hangs the second I try to do anything like burn a DVD to get my data off. Or start up an FTP client.

I load up Knoppix, a linux distro CD, and it's COMPLETELY unable to read my disks. Apparently Knoppix doesn't do RAID yet (my two drives on my box are in a RAID 0 config. Yeah, it's dumb, but that's how it came, and I was too lazy to change it. Look what that got me. RAID 0 is so freaking retarded. R means REDUNDANT.). So even though the machine is completely stable booted under a linux CD, the OS is completely unable to read it.

I get the smart idea of trying to share my home machine and grab the files off of it with my work laptop. Oops, my work laptop is under the "tellme.com" domain. No problem, I switch it over to the MSHOME workgroup and reboot.

Holy shit, now I can't get in my work laptop. I'm in my home workgroup, it still asks me for a username and password. I try my work account to no avail, but my home workgroup HAS no usernames or passwords. I reboot the machine, but now that it's in the MSHOME workgroup, it's not EVER going to let me back in. I have no idea why the hell not. But it wants a username and password.

So now I'm typing this on my work laptop booted under Linux. My home desktop is totally hosed, and I can't keep it up long enough to get my files off it. My work laptop won't boot Windows anymore because I changed its workgroup. And I have work to do this weekend.

I'm so pissed off that I want to slam my head through a wall.

God DAMN it.