what I'm gonna do now is go and take a shower. after the bathroom dries up completely tomorrow, I'm gonna chuck the machine in there and attempt to clone the failing drive with dd to see if I can salvage his old data from it. it's most probably gonna take a LONG time (just having the drive connected added about 10 seconds to booting into BIOS) so can't have it in the same room as I sleep in. if that fails then I'll just have to break the bad news to him. remember to keep backups, kids!