Horrid Hard Drives & Hairy Holidays
…A depressingly sad 'blogmail' from Kris

So I went to France this past few weeks, twice… The first time was pretty good, skiing in the south, lovely weather, the works… Then, Mum got her purse taken in Geneva (that convention place), she also later broke her arm coming down the stairs, resulting in many trips to a local hospital and 3 pins in her arm. The total of this was the loss of my Grandparent's credit cards, one of her credit cards and £200-odd pounds of cash. When I returned from this holiday I found out that the card that was stolen was the one that was paying for my do-everything server, so the result was the tearing down of my website and all my files, until I got them restored after paying a fee. I was then getting ready to pack for a holiday with my school to Disneyland Paris, which was actually pretty good, apart from the fact that I found over £20 worth of credit had gone from my Orange phone before I had even used it. Anyway, before I left we were about to start watching our TV, which runs on MythTV and Ubuntu 7.10, the backend was said to be offline, so I wandered upstairs to reboot it, thinking that it was just one of those segmentations that happen every other full moon. When walking into my room I was confronted with a blank screen, so I rebooted the computer and was presented with a disk check "not tested in 20 days… bla testing disk…" I was like, no big deal, happens every so often. Came back to it and it had a # in the middle of the screen and the hard drive light was on. I couldn't access anything on the computer what so ever, so I rebooted it… "Grub: Error 15"(I think)… oh crap. So I went to Google and it told me something could be missing, oh well… no big deal… live CD in the drive and back it all up, how hard can that be? Very, in fact, it didn't work, The partition on the drive was Unknown, it wouldn't mount and I couldn't see any files on it. –(Just for some background here, there are 3 drives in the machine, a 200gb with our music and TV shows on etc, a 40gb drive with the Home folder and a Swap partition, and a 160gb which contained all recorded TV and stuff like that, MythTV was set to put everything in there. We have about 100gb of TV/Music/Film that we ripped off dvd's etc and other stuff on the 200, and that was the dead drive…) So I left it for a while, made some posts on some forums and got nothing back… So If anyone would like to assist, please do, I will be very grateful. I was looking around and it appears that it's possible to directly access data on some drives, so I assumed that I could have just done that.. But as of yet I have not found any suitable applications.

Sorry for the long post, but I'm very peed, and I'm at risk of having the whole MythTV replaced with a set top, meaning no networked music, and no always on machine for downloads.