All his files in one place, and it's gone and been ruined. Sherlock Holmes frowned at his laptop. It had failed him utterly. The hard disk had crashed and there was nothing more to be done.
It had happened spontaneously, in the middle of a crucial email. Sherlock instantly suspected that somehow he'd got a virus, but he'd updated quite recently and had just run a scan. The screen had become a mass of garbled characters and colours, and the sound from the speakers had caused a half-awake John to run into the living room brandishing Sherlock's riding crop. (Sherlock didn't want to know why John had it in the first place, and to be honest, he didn't care.)
"Just my computer, John," he'd said curtly. Nevertheless, John whacked it, which succeeded in clearing up the garbled nonsense on the screen. Neither of them were terribly pleased with the message that the computer responded with.
HARD DISK FAILURE
Please reinstall operating system
They took it to the nearest computer shop, to see if it could be repaired without losing information. It couldn't.
"All my files were on there," Sherlock explained to the man. "Everything. From criminal records of the 1800s to my own musical compositions. You have to fix it."
"I'm sorry, but a dead computer's a dead computer."
John saw Sherlock's fists clench. "Serial killers could escape justice if I don't have the files on that computer," Sherlock said, confusion and anger causing his voice to quaver. "People might and probably will die."
"There's nothing I can do!" The man was intimidated by Sherlock, understandably, and John forced himself in front of Sherlock to prevent the taller man from physically attacking the terrified clerk.
"Uh, well, thank you," John said. "Come on, Sherlock," he added, making sure to break Sherlock's stare of death on the man and practically dragging him out. "Maybe Mycroft knows someone," he suggested.
"Possibly," Sherlock sighed. "Except he's not answering my texts. I had already thought of that option." John did the dangerous thing and left Sherlock alone at the flat with the computer (he had to go to work), and when he returned, Sherlock was sitting, frowning at the bits and pieces of his carefully disassembled laptop.
"What?"
"Bored. Never knew what was inside my computer and I decided to find out, since I can't possibly do it any more harm."
Only then did John notice the chemical smoke pouring from the computer. He just stood, staring.
"Overamperage does interesting things to electronics," Sherlock said before coughing at the potentially toxic smoke.
John opened the window and threw Sherlock's experiment onto the street, earning himself a frown and a lack of conversation for the rest of the evening.