yesterday while i was working, twiddle thumbs was a dear and went to the apple store to buy disk rescue. she ran the program and it did a quick scan quickly. it recognized my laptop's volume and said it could recover all 74gb in whole or in chunks. there's only one problem: the external hard drive that's connected doesn't have enough free space to store it all. you have to select a drive before you scan. hooking up a new drive or disconnecting the drive to empty it out will require running the scan all over again. we have no choice, we must disconnect and run it again. only, now the quick scan is not so quick. it's gonna take 42 hours. i hope not too much longer than that! then it's going to have to save to the drive. i don't know how long that will take. i just can't be in the room or the house during the process so it's great that i'm working 'cos i'd go crazy sitting in the room, turning to the screen every few minutes to see any signs of progress.

i have read many reviews on the software and some are wonderful, some are bad. i take it that the bad reviews are from users whose disks were completely fucked and unsalvageable. i pray that my disk has not gotten to that point. from what little i know, i think my disk's error is not a physical issue but rather a cataloging issue--the disk doesn't know where the startup is and the filing system is all out of order.