Mention the phrase “My hard drive crashed” in public today and it is quite likely that total strangers will rush to your side offering condolences, Kleenexes, and personal anecdotes of overcoming adversity from their own crashes. Just five years ago, such an announcement would just as frequently lead to blank stares. Alas, we’ve all become more than computer users, we’ve become a nation of digital natives.

Pictures, emails, writing, videos, music – the contents of our personal hard drives have come to represent our own personalities as much as our living spaces do. Perhaps more so. After all, if I painetd my apartment as frequently as I change the wallpaper on my laptop, my landlords would have a fit and I’d likely suffer irreparable brain damage from the fumes.

So, imagine my horror this morning when a download was suddenly met with an error message stating that my hard drive had converted to “Read Only”. With six virtual desktops, I had a lot going on as the horror sent my heartbeat through the roof. I started closing applications as quickly as I could, issuing those small prayers we all give in such moments. “Please computer, just let me shut down. If you just let me get through this, I swear, I’ll back everything up!”

Applications failed as a I went, freezing at a frantic pace, graying with inactivity as I rushed to click the closing “x” button. Seconds later, the entire desktop froze and I was forced to jam the power button for a hard reboot. I was greeted by computer’s splash screen and a statement that the system was going to check my disk for errors.

And then that froze.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is when the true terror of being a digital native sets in. I was looking at a total loss. I don’t keep many photos on my laptop, and I’ve basically got all of my music stored on my living room computer – which allows for some measure of safety. But I am also a writer, which means I have a great deal of content on my machine, including the first seven chapters of my current novel. Granted, I have physical backups, but that’s a lot of typing to get back to where I was. Add into that the time it takes to get everything reset – finding all of my bookmarks, reinstalling all of my programs, remembering all of my passwords – and rebuilding a computer becomes a hassle that can easily occupy a week.

I rebooted my computer again, and the system failed to even reach the splash screen, dumping me instead into the land of white text on a black screen known affectionately as the “command line”.

I started pounding away at the line, trying to figure out what was wrong. Luckily my computer gave me a cryptic deathbed error message. I rushed into the living room and Googled that, but all of the forums I could find were rather obscure about what exactly to do.

Meet Tux, he saved my life*

This is the part where the penguin comes into play. About a year and a half a go, I was working as tech support for a hosting company and was forced to work with Linux. I say forced, because up until that point I’d always been a staunch, even militant, Windows fanboy. Yes, I know, attributing fanboyism to any particular OS pushes any conversation into the murky, musty, sweaty realms of geekery which most people are naturally uncomfortable with. And that’s a rather apt metaphor for how I felt about Linux at the time.

But, using Linux was part of my job, and I desperately wanted to keep said job, so I grabbed the easiest Linux distro I could find and put it on the laptop I was using at the time so that I could practice at home. The experience was eye-opening. Running Ubuntu made my laptop faster and the operating system was so easy to customize that my workflow at home improved dramatically. Within a few days, using my computer was less about interacting with programs, and more about having it do what I wanted it to do.

This isn’t to say that Ubuntu, or Linux in general, was some sort of massive technology salve. It was actually far from it. Linux has a learning curve which requires a user to actually use the internet to find solutions. Linux assumes you know what you’re doing, and we all know the cliché about assumptions. But, it did what I wanted it to do, and it did it well.

After that computer died (the LCD lamp gave up the ghost and wasn’t worth replacing), I received a hand-me-down from my hetero-lifemate and wine guru, George. It was a beast of a laptop, already several years old and running the silicon version of a Detroit Big Block for a processor. For all intents and purposes, this machine was meant to be a stopgap until I could build a proper desktop. But, throwing Ubuntu on it and adding a couple gigs of RAM meant that it got the job done, and done well.

Or it did, until the hard drive started to reach the end of its lifespan. And here’s where the penguin – the Linux mascot – saved me. Today’s crash wasn’t the end. While the results I got searching my specific error were vague, there was a common thread through several of them, a command “fsck”. With little to lose, and nothing but the command line at my disposal, I gave it a whirl.

Streams of code flew by, many containing the same error, there was corruption on the disk which had resulted in some orphaned inodes – that’s the excuse computers give when they put something somewhere and can’t quite remember where it was. However, I was then prompted with a very simple question, “Do you want to fix (y)?”

The answer was an emphatic “y”. My computer responded with a bit of a whirl, fixed the issue, and then continued. Over the course of a half an hour or so, my behemoth Linux laptop fixed every problem with that hard disk that it could find, and then came to a rest. I figured, “what the heck?” and rebooted.

I was rewarded by OS splash screen and my laptop launch right into my desktop. Thrilled, I lived up to my end of the bargain, zipped up my important goods and tossed one set onto a remote server and the a second onto my living room computer.

Yes, there’s still a ticking, invisible clock over my computer, letting my know that my stopgap will soon need its own stopgap, but in the meantime, I don’t have to retype all of those documents. In all my years working with less-than-cutting edge hardware, I’ve never had a computer save itself from such a major hardware crash.The triumph there rests with the legions of people up the pipeline making sure that Linux stays both awesome and free.