No false modesty here July 27 2021

The cosmos came through . I researched repairing corrupted files and in the end found a simple solution without having to spend an arm and a leg on a recovery program. ChkDsk my friends was my saviour. Although no computer would recognize my external hard drive, if I checked properties it showed working properly , that one partition was NTFS and the other was RAW-- the one to fix. I did try a free recovery program trial so that it would show me if files were indeed recoverable, and it looked like it as they all showed up. So: more reading on the net about Chkdsk which I had tried but did not know the command prompt to type in, so dismissed initially. I always complain that people writing computer instructions forget we're not all geeks and that we don't know dos etc etc --we've been spoiled. However, I finally found an article that showed me the simple 'instruction', I typed it in and held my breath. The rest is history. All my corrupted files were repaired and the HD once more 'accessible' to any computer. Not wanting to take any chances however , I ordered a new Adata HD which has an armour -like exterior to protect against drops , bumps etc and began tfing my file history to that . The old HD is only about 2 years or so old, and has never properly backed up-- a corrupted file from the beginning, so who knows how long the 'repair' will hold.

Persistence is the key , not just in writing but in everything. Keep that in mind when things get tedious.