Evil in a $5 CD

Okay. My newsgroup access is back. My emails are sending from a thing other than a UNIX telnet account.

I keep telling myself that all this is good.

One of the things I was going to do today was copy the backup of the files I'd made onto a CD, just before my computer died a week or so ago. I was so proud I'd backed everything up. Until today, the backup CD worked fine.
Then.
I tried to open it up.
Black bar across top of screen.
Automatic restart. I frown, restart again, put the CD back in after ejecting it.
Same thing.
The entire evening.

This is the second one of these that's died on me.
It isn't even the same manufacturer of CDs.

I tried running the DiskScanner that came with the CD making program. It told me there was an unfixable error in the ICQ backup directory, and then gave me a General Protection Fault and quit on me.

And this one wasn't just a few settings.
It was my schoolwork for the last semester.
It was all of my important information like addresses and ICQ nicknames and all of my website files.

It was my stories and poems and my play. It wasn't just the stories I've written for the past five years, some of which I think I may still have elsewhere. It was the story I wrote last night. It was the play I said I'd finish before December.
It was the place I'd backed up my novel onto, so I wouldn't have to worry about losing it in a hard drive crash.
My novel.

*wonders if the plastic sword she got as a gift will make her computer bleed*

I'm going to bed now.

Relieved

Well. I managed to use my other CD Drive to open the CD and get most of the stuff off. There's only one file that wouldn't transfer, and I'd made an alternate version of it that transferred ok. And if I only lost one file out of this fiasco, that's really good.

I didn't believe the relief I felt when my "writings" directory transferred intact. I could feel the tension draining out. Hurrah!