If all goes well, the service engineer of Compaq should be in today, so hopefully by the end of the day, I'll be able to reinstall a working W2K configuration to keep me going until the TiBook arrives. Just mail, Java and Eclipse will have to do it. I also closed down our company website since today is the big protest day against software patents in Europe, and if the Compaq guy shows up early in the morning, we might as well hop in the car by noon and drive to Brussels.
I brought two books with me, so if sitting behind the weary screen of our trusty Linux server becomes boring, I can settle down in the office sofa. Reading email from a terminal window really causes me a splitting headache. Yesterday, I also asked for a quote from a data recovery company, and they told me it's 150 EUR (minus shipping) for a firm estimate, and then 700 EUR upto infinity to actually get the work done. We're talking about two years of data, so it might be worth its price. Also, my 1.5 Gig picture collection is gone. I was planning to move them to a DVD once I got the files moved to my TiBook with SuperDrive. Ha! ;-|
Thanks for all the tips and nice emails I received. Knoppix didn't help, though, since it failed to recognize the hard drive as a valid block device. The noises emerging from the disk are now also becoming really worrisome.
About the patents protest: I somehow doubt that closing a webpage (or a zillion of them, for that matter) will force the EU mogols to review their opinion... but I might miss something, of course.