What a waste of a day. I finally got everything loaded back on. I was able to recover *most* of my data by throwing the drive in the freezer for about an hour and then copying it onto the new drive.
I think including office, but discounting the reboots for connecting and disconnecting the drive, my final post install reboot count is at 8. That's pretty rediculous if you ask me.
Now I have to figure out how I'm going to makeup the lost day. Who needs sleep?
I sent this in an IM, but it's good enough to post here:
On death and dying: reconciling yourself to hard drive failure
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/hdfailure.ars