First, after months of back and forth with it, my com­puter died of a moth­er­board cor­rup­tion. I had enough time to back every­thing up before it died com­pletely; I wasn’t too scarred from it. I was out $700 to get a replace­ment though.

Silly me bought the same com­puter, just the next model that they’d come out with. It works mostly okay, but I’ve had lit­tle issues with it not turn­ing on when you press the but­ton since I got it. My hus­band just thinks I’m paranoid.

Because of those lit­tle issues, I never took every­thing off my exter­nal drive that I’d put every­thing on from the old com­puter. I thought it would be safer that way.

Then we moved.

Then I tossed a bag of cat treats out of a box, onto my desk think­ing I’d deal with them later but I needed my hair­brush from the box I was dig­ging in. No, I don’t know why my hair­brush and the cat treats got put in the same box.

Then Mandy found where I tossed the treat bag and attacked it.

Then my exter­nal drive crashed to the floor.

Now, I’ve spent a whole day and more try­ing to get it to work. It won’t.

The com­puter doesn’t rec­og­nize it as an option in what used to be called my com­puter. I go into disk man­age­ment, and it is there. It’s just unal­lo­cated. It doesn’t have a let­ter assigned to it. I looked up some help sites online and they all said to try par­ti­tion­ing the drive. It’s write pro­tected and I can’t change any­thing about it. Apparently that’s a com­mon error on these types of dri­ves to do that with no warning.

I’m scared that I’ll lose every­thing. That I’ve already lost everything.

My pic­tures, which include those of my nieces when they were babies, my cats from kit­ten to now, my wed­ding, my friends’ wed­ding, trips, us, things around the house, the new house before we moved in, the old apart­ment, hol­i­days, fam­ily. All my music. My files, my bud­get, bill back­ups, site back­ups, quilt back­ups, game saves, games and pro­grams. Literally every­thing I’d decided to keep when prepar­ing to lose my old com­puter, my list of pass­words to sites I don’t use much … and now don’t remem­ber that I’ve signed up at. About 600GB worth of stuff.

The only thing I won’t lose is the cur­rent file for my novel. I will lose the out­line, but I do have a printed copy. My old school­work files. My old writ­ing files. The files and scans from buy­ing my house. Some of my music that I’d already trans­ported to the new com­puter. And any­thing that I have on CD still, music and game wise.

My only hope is that my hus­band can fix it. I don’t know what he can do though that I haven’t already tried. He hasn’t got­ten to it yet. He’s been really sick for almost two weeks now, and is just start­ing to get over his bron­chi­tis and pneumonia.

I don’t have the money to take it some­where for a data recov­ery. I tried one I found online, but the com­puter doesn’t rec­og­nize it as hav­ing a drive let­ter, so I can’t select to drive to recover the files from.

Question to the read­ers: Any idea what I can do?