She's Dead, Jim...

It's official... The main hard drive in our desktop at the house died last night (or rather early this morning). I was playing Duke Nukem and the computer froze, rebooted itself, and blue-screened with an "unbootable media" error. Tried the "drive in the freezer" trick - no go. After the thaw, the drive just clicks-clicks-clicks. Fortunately, for the past year or so we have been saving pictures on the various machines we have here in the house (including the HP MediaVault).  Not every picture is backed up to any one place, so that will be taken care of this weekend.

For me, the loss of the drive means the loss of recent baseball card scans, but at least my card database is already stored on the MediaVault!  As for other data, it means the loss of my saved games.  I know, for those who are not gamers, you may see that as no big deal.  I spent many recreational hours into the wee hours of the morning building up my various levels, characters, etc.  Ironically, I had set about half a dozen personal best records in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2010 just last night.  I had also managed to work my way pretty far in Duke Nukem Forever.  Oh well, we pick up the pieces and punt.

I am almost certain there were documents that hadn't been backed up in a while, though.  We won't know which until we want to find them again.  And, of course there are the things we won't even realize until we try to find them.  Then again, there are things that have been taking up space and needed to be deleted anyway... right?

So, it looks like I'll be hard drive shopping this weekend.  I do not look forward to reinstalling Windows. UGH.  In the meantime, I have downloaded Reflect to image our drives once everything is up and running again.  That way, should this happen again, I just fire up the boot cd, connect the image and restore.

The hardware demons have won this round... As they said in the old Tom & Jerry cartoon: Touche', pussy cat!  But, as they said in Cars, "No, no, no, no... (I) will have (my) chance... (I) will have (my) chance!"