I'm BAAAAACK!
I just got my replacement hard drive today... I set about running extensive tests to make sure everything worked properly. 6 hours of scans, to be exact. A basic check to the first and last areas to check for bad sectors, then a full scan to check for bad sectors, then I made it write zeros to the first and last areas, and then I made it write zeroes to the entire drive. I guess they all registered what they were supposed to be, because it passed with flying colors.
The Vista x64 install on a nVidia RAID 1 went absolutely flawlessly this time. The array is healthy and I've managed to recover all my IM logs and settings and all my cookies and passwords and bookmarks and history for Firefox and Opera and I recovered my life's worth of emails in Thunderbird. I had some real problems with Firefox exploding when it tried to read my copied profile, and I had problems with Thunderbird going into some odd start loop where it would load and crash, very quickly... So fast that by the time you went to end the process, it had terminated itself and started again and the old process was invalid. Turns out that the profiles for both were actually flagged as Read Only... How? No idea. But once I changed that, it worked heavenly. How appropriate that Song of Freedom from Doctor Who was playing at the time this all suddenly worked.
My next order of business? I have no idea... Get some normality back in my digital life, maybe? Start blogging a little more? I'm downloading all my Steam games as we speak, and it will probably take more than all night, but at least I can do that again! What I'm really happy for, though, is getting back all my emails... I've saved every email from all the way back in 2004. 1GB of pure text. Very similar to my IM logs, which go back to 2005. Saved every conversation since then... Lost a few in the crash, but nothing too important. I'm back to being able to pull up what people told me years ago, hah!
But now? BED!