That's when the National Weather Service broke in on TV to give thunderstorm warnings and a tornado watch for the next couple of hours. I wasn't feeling so cocky anymore, me, with my 10 minute backup UPS, and about an hour of vital copying to go. So I booted the system up. Windows seemed a bit confused, insisting it had not been shut down properly, so it wanted to run Scandisk. So I opened up Explorer, and about thirty minutes of copying later, shut down the system and disconnected the old drive.
Life is good.
And I bet you didn't think this story was going to have a happy ending. I sure didn't. Oh my god. Congrats on your new wide-open spaces. An electron with room to breathe is a happy electron.