Good times: I’m dealing with another hard drive crash. This one is less traumatic than previous ones, but it still sucks. It’s a 160GB drive formated for NTFS that was a sort of extra data drive for my Windows box. I have managed to CHKDSK.EXE the drive several times, but it’s not happy. However, something of the filesystem lives and I think the leostream converter floppy disk appears to be able to read the raw disk. So, I’ll buy some new drives tomorrow and image the old disk across.

This is much less fun than writing software. Happy friggin’ birthday.

(No, I’m not tired of that stupid camel picture yet.)

UPDATE: Most of my digital infrastructure is lying in pieces on the floor of my apartment. Here’s the cascading failures:

• Second HD on my WinXP box has some kind of HW failure — locks up machine
• HD removed
• WinXP reconfigure for one drive
• After few hours, it too locks up
• Couldn’t rip CDs on my linux box, cdrom apparently not available
• More digging on the linux box, one of the disks in my two disk SW RAID1 has gone tits up
• Bought two new 160GB Western Digital drives (with $80 rebates for each)
• Replaced failed RAID1 disk, rebuilt raid, am syncing the disks (slowly)
• Have installed other 160GB drive on WinXP box, partitioned into 40GB/120GB, reinstalled XP, slaved the old C: drive for file access

Need a real backup plan. I didn’t lose any important data this time. Probably will get a USB drive to hang off linux box for “offline” storage.

I’d love to know what Bill Gates does for this crap. He must have a private IT staff.

Also, there’s a blog post sitting on my old C drive waiting to be posted.