My hard drive failure really threw a monkey wrench into my plans. I'm in the process of reinstalling and configuring software now. Luckily I've been good about backing up my data (and my music library!) to an external hard drive regularly but configuring software is still a very tedious process. I never realized just how many little apps & customizations I had on my machine until now. Hopefully things will be back to normal tomorrow.
After this experience I realize that I really need to be taking disk images and not just backing up my data. So I've purchased an HP Media Vault which will help to facilitate those type of backups. If I ever have another hard drive get zapped the restoration will be MUCH easier since I'll just be able to install the disk image.
Same thing happened to me a week before your computer went down. Lucky that my computer had two hard drives with RAID. Even then, it still needed a quick trip to the local chop shop to bring it back to life.
Good luck!!!
I feel your pain. I learned my backup lesson over the years...several times. Unfortunately, as they say, the best laid plans...
I had my PC die on me a few months ago. I had a decent backup plan in place, but I still ended up with some corrupted, unrecoverable files (mostly related to email) -- redundancy apparently only goes so far, and Murphy always seems to be waiting in the wings.
I got a new Vista laptop as a replacement. I've been keeping a log in Onenote of *every* change I make to the system and every application I install. It's a bit of a pain now, but if (or when) I have to start from scratch again, I'll have a nice checklist to follow -- rather than my aging memory.