Hard drive failure.
I lost a major one. My backups are old, and I have made a lot of changes on things since then. I have no clue what caused the failure. One day, it worked and I was getting work done. The next day, poof, the partition tables were gone. I've been running diagnostics and saving what I can from it for about 24 hours now.
The tex files I lost are easy enough to piece together from what I can pull off with photorec and testdrive. That was the major work I lost. Most of the other stuff for my work related things aren't essential, and have good backups.
However, the Alps Party documents are currently missing. Excel files are hard to grep into and find. I think this drive held the only copies of my Alps Party paperwork. If I can't recover that by tax time, I'm FUUUUUUUCKED.
If you've already run the basic diags and can't restore your data, I've heard good things about these guys but it won't be cheap. That sucks dude, I hope it works out.
http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/
Thanks for the suggestion, but I am way too poor for that. I'm not sure what they could do either. I
have the data off of the drive. The problem is that the data are extremely fragmented and often make no sense. I found half of one of my BibTeX files in a file named foobar.java. The other half was in a .txt file. I'd be willing to bet that a paid service would only get me as far as I already am. And it sucks.
According to what testdrive told me, and what parted and dosfsck confirmed, is that there were two partitions on top of each other. I have no clue how that could have happened. Pulling things out of the drive involved 'undeleting' things that were covered by the second partition of the same files. It makes no damn sense. I almost want to throw up my arms and proclaim it an unrecoverable cluster****, but I know I need to try.
The drive was full of other files that are junk to me. I used it as a backup for another drive. All that backup stuff is confusing what I do have from the restoration. Right now, the major concern are the Alps Party documents. Since most of that was stored in a series of .xlsx files, I can see if I have the correct one. Unfortunately, there are literally thousands of spreadsheets on this drive. So what I'm doing now is batch converting everything to csv, hoping I can grep something that says "alps party"
