How to crash your hard drive?

Sitting idle, without having much to do on this lazy Sunday morning, because of a crashed hard drive on my PC, I couldn’t find a better thing to do than to update my blog.
Every time I thought of my system, I felt miserable. It all just happened too fast, and by the time I realized it was just a bit too late. Now, when I look back and think about how it all happened, I am convinced; they were series of events that were waiting to be discovered by me. I perhaps may have done something to not let it happen, but I guess I was too excited with the outcome of the adventures I was having with my system. No idea ever flashed, for what was actually in store for me, and what I learnt was something that happened for the first time with me. In spite of being in the field of computers for over a decade, I never encountered this kind of problem. For once it did occur in my mind this was getting more exciting and can be a good feed for a desi techno masala action thriller!
I have a dual boot hard drive with Linux on one and Windows on the other partition. The Linux partition had its swap file on the same partition where OS was installed. Power cuts use to make my Linux OS repair its file system every time I boot on Linux, so I tried to create a swap partition on one of my other partitions, all in good faith. I made a DOS partition, on one of the four partitions I have, and formatted my newly created partition. I left some space for Linux swap. I thought I would do the rest of my work from Linux itself. I started my system and phew.., my GRUB loader failed!. I tried and tried, but couldn’t get the GRUB loader up, I left it as it is and hoped that it would understand and repair all by itself once I come back from my work. After getting back home, I started my system only to be disappointed, my prayers were unheard, and I was still having the same system showing me the dull black and white screen with messages that only geeks with masters in geekology would be able to comprehend. Though the whole day I tried to find a way out of this tricky situation on the internet, but perhaps the explanations were too alien for me to understand it in depth. Over the years in computers I have understood one thing, as you keep learning; the messages get more and more cryptic, something like “GRUB Loader failed Error 17”. Being into application development I am more used to getting meaningful error messages and I get the source code to debug. Here, I had more challenging situation, and tried seeking help from one of my friends, but he was too as clueless as I was. Finally I thought of using some commands on NT Recovery console, I have been reading it all on the internet while I was searching for repairing GRUB. And I thought of trying it, but then, what unfolded was absolutely funny. My system was unusable, NT reported error as if a dutiful mom was looking for her babies … it was not able to find NTLDR and I knew I was doomed. What I did was not easy, I wrote the boot record by using FIXBOOT and though difficult, I could do it with so much ease was because I didn’t know much about its actions on a multi-boot hard drive. I learnt one thing after all this adventure that, I should not use this command next time I am caught in this kind of situation. But perhaps, the adventure with my system was not yet over and script for the other part of my adventure was getting ready in my mind. Last time when I saw list of commands on recovery console of NT, I saw one more command called FIXMBR. I saw a ray of hope in this command as I read earlier on the net that GRUB has to do something with the MBR and this command was looking more promising as the time passed. My desire of seeing my system working was growing stronger every second I spent time in isolation. Even if it meant I cannot use Linux for sometime. I wanted to see my system ‘That Worked’ and, I was ready to take my chances. I ran the command and it gave me a warning message of loosing all the data on the hard drive, I went ahead and pressed key and I got very promising messages confirming MBR was written. I started my system and hoped for the best. After POST it tried loading the OS, but perhaps after issuing the earlier command my MBR got corrupted and my hard drive was doubly unusable. My system read “Invalid MBR”. I sensed a chill in my spine, and over the years I have learn't the art of getting out of these kinds of tight situations. By holding my head with my both hands and pressing while looking down does help me ease. I did that and it helped me a lot. I started thinking now what next? Any more tricks? I thought of giving up, and called my friend letting him know about this. I guess he was disturbed in middle of his sleep so I let him sleep. But I just couldn’t stop myself and wanted to know if there is any possibility of getting my valuables back. 80 GB of data, it’s a big thing to loose. I called another friend of mine in Hyderabad. I felt better when he said it is possible to recover the data. We had a very cordial discussion on this topic with Hindustani classical background music. My friend’s one and half year old daughter has started singing, and she made the ambiance as if it was of 15th – 16th century. Next day morning I took some more opinion about my problem and I learnt that I will have to give my hard drive to some hard drive specialist. I hope I will have it up and running soon, I still have to spend a day in exile before my data is recovered. How it feels when one looses a year of data and all the work?