As Feared

This morning, my personal laptop refused to boot, with the "A Disk Read Error has occurred" black screen, which is at least different from the more typical failure mode of just a blinking black cursor. Even more curiously, it won't boot from the bootable CD-ROM either.

I have another computer — my work machine from which I have indeed been working. But this is highly annoying, particularly as I ordinarily would be able to just swap drives to the backup and recover my data. I probably can still get at the data on my personal machine, since this error normally doesn't affect anything but the drive's ability to boot, and I can still get work done, but it's still annoying. I really don't want to have to drive back to Fremont if I can avoid it.

Redundancy

I brought two spare Dell D600 laptops with me, even though I forgot to bring any of the three clones backup hard drives for my main personal computer, which is machine 7 of the series of laptops I've used over the years. One of the spares is the one that didn't have a hard drive in it that I bought cheaply on eBay. I confirmed that the drive from machine 7 wouldn't boot on that one. The other spare was machine 6, from which I upgraded to a faster processor and because it was being cranky. However, machine 6 will at least boot on its hard drive. I can retrieve such files on which I'm working right now and install Skype on it. (One reason for having two active machines is so that I can use Skype while working on Day Jobbe; the company nanny software won't allow Skype to run.) So all is not lost, although I'm running on spares.