Welp, too late.
The Linux disk failed. I decided that the work I needed to do at home didn’t warrant having a thousand dollar paperweight on my desk, so I bit the bullet and installed Windows 98 on the 60GB drive. Apparently there’s still some corrupted data on my original 15GB drive that prevents me from installing Win98 on it as well, therefore it’s still got the password that won’t let me in, so I no longer have a backup drive (for the moment).
Gone: all my programs except for what came bundled in my computer purchase, 5 years’ worth of personal fictional writings, all sorts of digital information and .jpgs gathered from the internet, hundreds of teacher-made assessments and two years’ worth of archived newsletters I created for school… at least 150 fonts and a few images of artwork I’d done that I’d only had scanned versions of that I somehow never got around to backing up… I’m not even going to mention the thousands of Mp3s I’d been filesharing since Christmas, 1999 and my fileswapped episodes of SAMURAI JACK.
I’ve backed up, maybe, 40% of all the information I had on disk. All my writings are floating around in at least one hard copy, although many are not the final rewrites. This will take a loooOOoooong time to replace, retype, rescan, reorganize.
My BIOS password is in place, at least, and I won’t be handing THAT out to anyone.
Mom is banned.