Okay, guys, tell me what happened:

Terrible storm. Power surge, and I'm betting my computer was on a plain old power strip instead of a surge protector. It restarted.

And started making funny noises. I have a little dealie that allows me to have four drives: two hard drives, a Zip drive, and a floppy drive. Normally, it auto-detects them instantly. Now, it was crankity cranking as it detected them individually veeeerrry slowly. But finally, it did.

Then the primary drive failed. Run Setup. Press F1 to continue. I pressed F1.

It hung up trying to boot.

I Ctrl-Alt-Deleted, and I hit Del to try to go to Setup. Same thing happened with the loud noises and the failing primary drive and the inability to boot up. I turned the computer off, realizing my drive was probably fried.

I unplugged the power strip from the outlet. I also prayed.

One of those things must have worked, because an hour later when I plugged the power strip back in, the computer booted up without a hitch. It of course did a little consistency check, and there seemed to be a few corrupted Temporary Internet Files, but that was it. Everything back to normal.

So. What was it? God or electricity?

P-C, when lightning struck, aliens entered your computer. Don't worry - they'll die on their own .

(Whitefont for WotW spoilers.)

eta: Wait, have you seen WotW yet?

But seriously, that'w weird. But the turning it off probably unscrambled it, so it sounds like no permanent damage was done.

Wait, have you seen WotW yet?

No! Thanks for the whitefont.

But the turning it off probably unscrambled it, so it sounds like no permanent damage was done.

Yeah, I'm baffled as to why that fucking worked. I mean, the unplug/plug thing has worked for satellite receivers and TVs, but I didn't think it would work for the damn computer. It sounded awful, man. I was sure the drive was toast. It was all HDD ERROR OMG.

It could be the hard drive controlers were all scrambled, and a cold reboot reset them. Perhaps when the computer is turned on, some hard drive controller chip(s) receive programming from some BIOS chip or something.

That sounds plausible. So it was probably turning the computer off, not the unplug/plug, that did it.

Also, God, apparently.

Also P-C while I'm sure everything is cool if you have not done a backup in a while, tonight would probably be a good time. Which reminds- definitely time for me do a new backup.

I don't really have proper backup materials. At least, not externally. I have two hard drives. The C drive is the system drive and expendable except for the fact that OE has to put my mail there. The D drive is the data drive with all the important stuff. But I don't have a DVD-burner or anything.

Thumb drives are the new zip.

Thumb drives are the new zip.

For those who have a lot of money -- I have a 1GB jobbie do, but that's only for the stuff I cart about. Couldn't start to back up my system on it.

Though, if I were shopping, cute!

Well for true system backup the cheapest method is a DVD burner and some DVDRs. But for documents, databases, emails and small sets of pics I find that my 128MB thumb drive ($10.00) works like a charm. If necessary I use a second system and make more than one trip.