Some time around last October, my secondary hard drive died with a couple of huge, incomplete, and un-backed-up projects on it. It sounded to me like the motor in the thing was giving up the ghost. It would come on at first when I' d reboot, and then after about five minutes, I could hear the motor click off and wind down. I could reboot and it' d be back on, but not for long enough to copy all my files over. Also, the more I tried to reboot, the less amount of time it would stay on each subsequent time.

I took it out, replaced it, and set it aside as I considered the cost of sending it to some place with a clean room to get the disk switched out into a new drive. Hundreds of dollars, versus the long hours of re-doing these non-essential but still important projects.

But somewhere in the back of my mind, I had the vague idea that I' d just wait a long time and then try again later. Tonight, I put the drive back in my tower, booted it up and successfully copied off everything onto my new drive!

Ha! It makes no logical sense as far as I can tell. What really happened? How did waiting months make it possible to do this? Did the power of my superstition somehow override the reality of a faltering mechanical construct? Whatever the case, I' ve got my files back. I' ve worked with computers long enough to know that they are quirky as all hell. This one time, I defied logic and came away a winner.