Eureka, I think.

After 36 hours of disk analysis, and a half hour of index building, I was able to copy my old email files from the bad hard drive to a good hard drive. I also found some old SQL queries I had saved in TOAD, which didn't get backed up because they were saved in the same directory as the program. (I hate when programs do that.) I'll find out for sure when I bring everything in tomorrow.

For now, I'm content.

Had a bug report come in today. Someone was using a special character (specifically, an umlauted vowel) in a city name. While the HTML form enforced the 20-character limit on the field, the Oracle database saved the umlauted vowel as two characters, not one, resulting in a data overflow for that field. It won't try to save 21 characters in a 20-character field. I don't know if there's something we need to do with the database, or if I'll need to modify the query to strip them out.

Eureka! (or Dude, *here's* my mail.)

I recovered the mail file, transferred it to the PC at work, and lo and behold, I was able to read my old mail! Hooray for me!

Then I found out the the old mail file was there all the time, hiding. All I had to do was to load it into Outlook.

Oh well. I'm $79 poorer, but at least I know I can do data file recovery. That'll look good on the resume.

P.S. I heard that the code's supposed to drop later today.

Shout-outs: Happy birthday to hofdave and to catalana!