Urgh.
On Friday evening I came home from our final tech rehearsal for Richard II. Long story short, about fifteen minutes later my main computer had completely crapped out on me.
I still haven’t managed to actually figure out what went wrong. The initial symptoms were a severe system slow down — I would wiggle the mouse and, half a minute later, the cursor would move on the screen. Ditto for keyboard input. Eventually I was forced to power the computer down. When I tried to bring the computer back up, it wouldn’t boot up.
I futzed around for a bit and eventually the computer did boot up (although not as a result of anything I had actually done). However, two of my five hard drives had gone missing in action: The C, E, and G drives were showing up. The D and F drives were gone.
This was bad news. My D drive is where I keep all of my creative files. I do regular back-ups, but — predictably — the crash had happened only a couple days before my next scheduled backup (which meant the potential loss of data was about as bad as it could be and I was faced with the prospect of trying to reproduce about a hundred hours of work).
However, the fact that two hard drives had simultaneously disappeared — along with detection delays during the boot-up sequence — left me with some hope that the real culprit was a bad hard drive controller. (Althogh that would mean that my motherboard was fried and the computer was seriously screwed, that type of loss is just a matter of money. Lost creativity can never be regained.)
After a few more reboots, the F drive reappeared — although trying to read any data off of it proved almost impossible.
So I spent most of the weekend — when I wasn’t busy opening Richard II — backing up all the data I could off the hard drives I could still see. Then, last night, I began disassembling my main computer: Loading the hard drives into an external hard drive enclosure and trying to read them on my laptop.
That’s when things got weird. Of the five drives in my original computer, one was a SATA drive (which, if memory serves, is my original G drive). The external enclosure I was using wasn’t SATA compatible, so I wasn’t able to read that drive.
That’s not the weird part, the weird part is the other four drives: From the external enclosure I could read the C, D, and F drives. The fourth hard drive didn’t work — instead emitting a very disturbing noise and refusing to respond.
I can’t make any sense out of that: On my original box the C, E, and G drives worked. But not either the E or G drive was bad and the D and F drives (which had disappeared) were working just fine.
So my next step is to re-assemble the original computer with just the boot drive and then I’ll begin adding hard drives one by one to see what happens. (To make matters more complicated, my computer has two completely separate hard drive controllers — both on the motherboard.)
But the good news is that, with the D drive working in the external hard drive enclosure, I was able to backup all of my creative files. Nothing was lost that can’t be replaced.
The bad news is that the only computer I can currently work on is my laptop — which was previously only setup for word processing. So, in addition to trying to rebuild my original computer (which is probably going to end with the conclusion that, at the very least, I need a new motherboard), I also need to get my laptop setup with the wide variety of programs I need to continue doing my creative work.
For example, I didn’t have an HTML editor or an FTP program installed on the laptop… which made updating this website rather difficult. (Obviously, this has now been solved.)
My next goal is to get the suite of software I use for Dream Machine Productions installed — Adobe Photoshop, Dundjinni, and Quark. And I need to figure out how I’m going to hook the laptop up to a color-corrected monitor and mouse so that my work with some of those programs can be productive. This isn’t particularly onerous, but it is time-consuming. And until it happens, work on projects like Legends & Labyrinths and the next City Supplement have ground to a halt.
The good news is that, starting tomorrow, I’ll be able to start posting the last of the Keep on the Shadowfell remix material I was originally going to post over the weekend. I’m looking forward to finishing that up and then moving onto some playtest reports
