HitchHiker's Guide Entry> Metamorphosis 

200712.20 - Defined as follows:
1. Biology. a profound change in form from one stage to the next in the life history of an organism, as from the caterpillar to the pupa and from the pupa to the adult butterfly.
2. a complete change of form, structure, or substance, as transformation by magic or witchcraft.
3. any complete change in appearance, character, circumstances, etc.

Example: Butterfly. ...Before a butterfly is ever a butterfly as we know it, it goes through several stages of life before realizing how great it is to be a butterfly. Entering visible existence as an egg, this stage is rather insignificant and usually overlooked by most living organisms and always ignored by non-living organisms. Emerging from the egg is a caterpillar, at which point it begins eating. The caterpillar so enjoys this newly-learned ability that it continues to eat for a few weeks. Having eaten far too much, the caterpillar pauses to loosen its belt and maybe even unbutton its pants for comfort. Lethargic with food, the future butterfly decides a nap will do it well. To assure an uninterrupted sleep, the caterpillar spins a cocoon around itself and promptly nods off. Due to the lack of alarm clocks in the butterfly world, our subject remains in this pupa stage for another week or so. It wakes up and and comes out to a good news/bad news scenario.

The good news: it now has large, colorful wings and no longer looks like a grub. It also no longer has to pay a penalty to rent a car.

The bad news: It spent half it's life crawling around, eating salad and sleeping.

At which point it immediately flies off, completely unaware of the potential havoc it could wreak with a simple flap of its wings.

When it comes to computer hardware, metamorphosis is never as beautiful. It's usually backwards in comparison to the process of the butterfly. I woke up Monday to find my butterfly of a hard drive had rolled itself up and proceeded to eat its own wings off. In other illustrative words, it went from an intricate piece of machinery to a brick.

We (and by we I mean my friends who actually know a thing or two about fixing computers and hardware and stuff, of which I do not include myself) are working on a few things to recover the data off of it, but with no success so far. I'm starting to come to terms with the loss of data...pictures, music, artwork, an excel worksheet that I custom made to keep track of my budget, all my editable files for my websites and other work. Oh, for crap's sake!
Okay, so I'm not quite ready to come to terms with the loss of data.

But, as is my custom, I am not panicking. I still have access to a computer and the internet from my house (as evident by my ability to write this post). I just do not look forward to getting a new hard drive (and an external backup while I'm at it), installing XP + SP2, installing all the other stuff (office, CS3, drivers...). Oh well.

So they say things happen in threes. I don't recall this being something I've ever confirmed in my own experience, so I can't say how much there is to that statement. If it is true, this would be my 2nd of 3. The first was my iPod (which is back to normal). So I worry what #3 would be..the red ring of death on my XBox? My left arm falls asleep and never wakes up? My icemaker in my fridge goes crazy...oh wait. My icemaker already does that. Great.