Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

My laptop's hard disk decided to give up last night -- I haven't dropped the laptop or anything it just decided to stop working. I got a blue screen of death in Win XP and the next time I tried booting up, a funky noise came from the hard disk, Windows does start to boot, but it gets stuck when loading the following driver (in Safe or any other mode):

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\agpCPQ.SYS

It hangs there for a while and then a blue screen of death appears (can't make out the error) followed by immediate reboot. I hope I can access the drive using a recovery console by booting off the CD (will have to wait till Monday to try that at the office - don't have a bootable XP CD - doh!).

I've had about 5 different company laptops over the past 8 years or so and this is the THIRD time this has happened to me! And its always a Dell ... gotta say something about their QC! The one time it crashed I lost ALL data -- since the hard disk was not even being recognised by the BIOS. Backups this time? Some ... but still I would lose a lot, not to mention loss in productivity 'cos of recreating, reinstalling everything. I was in the middle of a couple of assignments for school due Monday which I'll have to start over. Backing up on CD-Rs is not a perfect solution as I've learned that "burned" CDs develop data loss after a few years...perhaps its time to invest in a good external HDD.

UPDATE: Thanks to our Internal Computing department and Ken Nguyen, most of my data was saved except for all my saved offline emails and some project docs (most of which are posted somewhere but will need a lot of effort to recollect and rebuild).

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