In which I prove my dominance over the computer

My computer's hard drive has been getting full lately, so I started making noises about wanting to buy a new drive for my computer. My wife, sensibly, pointed out that I had a perfectly good external hard drive that I hadn't been using for a while, and so I pulled it out of storage, set it up, and found it was, indeed perfectly working. So, I copied a bunch of media files over - Videos, some pictures, some ebooks...

And then my external drive stopped working. Grumble. Happily, it was a quiet sort of not working - data wasn't coming out (and it wasn't showing up as a drive), but it wasn't making angry noises, at least. Trying to fix it over usb wasn't working, so I cracked the case and pulled it out and hooked it up to my computer, along with a new SATA hard drive I did buy this weekend. Annoyingly, my case didn't have any free ATA connectors, so I had to go with disconnecting the DVD-Rom drive so I could attach the hard drive, which was balanced on the end of a kleenex box.

After this and that and poking, the solution turned out to boot into ubuntu, install testdisk, and run it there - where testdisk on Windows XP didn't work, the linux version was able to find and restore the partition table, and soon I was quickly copying all my files onto the new drive. The drive's probably still good, after all that - I think a partition table problem is more of a software/os glitch than anything else - but for now I'm probably going to be too busy to get it back into it's case. It was nice to get it working - and it was nice not to lose that stuff. (The important parts were backed up, but it's nice to get things working.)