Well, for some unknown reason, all of my network devices went into a cascading failure. Actually, I think it was some network packet monitoring software I was running for work. Anyway, it caused my wireless to fail, then my wired networking.
Fortunately, my HDD was still good. I used a large USB2 HDD to copy off [...]

Is it turned on ? - that may sound like a stupid question for a 20+ year computer geek but one of the issues was the fact my new X60 has an “off switch” for the wireless. It got bumped somewhere along the way.
Verify you backups. - I would have been up and running a [...]