Bah! *grumble mumble*

[Isometric Bacon]

Hey guys. Wouldn't have believed what happened the other day.

There I was, minding my own buisness, working on the software for my Cabinet, (Had MAME, ZSNES, GENS, Nester, and Project 64 all running smoothly through Mamewah, with screenshots) when I decide "Hmm. I think i'll play some old school bombjack on the nes". So, I fire it up, load the menu and hit start when it tells me too. Okay fine. I brace myself and get ready to play... only my gameplay is interupted by a nasty blue screen.
Doing what I normally do when i'm confronted with any blue screens of any description, telling me about some general exception fault of some kind, I hit keys to skip all the jargon. Comp freezes, and I reset.

Windows XP begins to open, asks me for my ID. I enter it and hit enter. It then says "cannot find ID" and promptly freezes again... uh oh. Upon resetting, I get a "booting error, insert boot disc to continue." My fears were correct, a total hard drive failure.

So, I've lost all my software/roms/homework/movies/silly little videos and MP3's that I had stored on my PC. Luckily nothing serious is gone, and some of it, (Roms, thank god, the most important thing ) I have backed up. But there is still quite a bit gone.

I think the reason It crashed so suddenly was because it might have been shoddy, (our friends crashed about the same time, 1 and a half years of ownership) doubled with the fact that it had been very low on disk space for awhile. (although, ironically that morning I free'd like 3 gigs... and THEN it froze   )

Oh well. Nothing too serious I suppose. At least I will have a chance to work on my cabinet, and stop playing so many damn games .

Oh hmm., I suppose I should attempt to make this thread actually relevant... so here's a funny link for you all .

"When people don't know how to use computers"

http://sct.staghosting.com/

[Spaced Invader]

Man, that sucks!

 As a great man once said, "I feel your pain."

 

[rampy]

I was just putting the final touches on a DOS based cabinet and...

unfortunately we hadn't bothered to mount the HD/CD drive at all, so there were just resting on top of eachother on a shelf.  

I had to tilt the CD rom drive (and the HD was on top of that drive) in order for there to be clearnace from the wall to eject and replace the CD.  The top harddrive slid funny and the exposed PCB on this particular drive grounded out on the CD case and there was a spark/arc and the computer shut down (uh oh)

SUffice to say that drive is toast.  Some of the semiconductor style resistors were a melted mess... and ide auto detection wouldn't pick it up, nor would it post...

Blah... back to reconfiguring dos drivers, etc etc...

calgon .. take me a way!

rampy

[nighthawk2099]

All I can say is......

CD-RWs are your friends.....

Easy and cheap backup solutions.......

[radiator]

hard drives are evil...spawn of the devil

my first and only HDD failure was about a year and a half ago...stupid IBM 'Deathstar' (aka Deskstar) - only had it for 13 months

[AlanS17]

I've been witness to more hard drive crashes than I can count. A particular model know as "bigfoot" would always go out when I worked for TXDot. In fact, my second drive has been acting up lately and has refused to spin up fast enough at startup. Luckily, it's just my second drive and nothing is too important on it (except the 20GB of MP3's...)

[paigeoliver]

I like to keep my roms collected on at least two separate hard drives. They seem to be much harder to find now than they were back in the old days. I also have some CDR backups of them as well.

[kspiff]

Wha?  DeathStar?  I swear by those drives, I still have some that have lasted probably 5+ years now.. and I'm *horrible* about maintenancing my computer

I guess mileage varies *shrug*

[radiator]

Wha?  DeathStar?  I swear by those drives, I still have some that have lasted probably 5+ years now.. and I'm *horrible* about maintenancing my computer

I guess mileage varies *shrug*

lucky...

there were two models that had a terrible lifespan, the 60GXP and the 75GXP - after mine died i started asking questions one the Bit-Tech message boards...turns out that IBM drives are prone to dying after a year or so

i've still got mine, boxed up, ready to be sent back and replace...but, you need to send the drives to Sweden (or somewhere close...can't remember)...

[kspiff]

Hm.. odd again, I think I have a couple of those.. still no probs..

I know some of them are the DTL-xxxx (I think) line/ revision..?

Might have something to do with all of my drives having active cooling *shrug*, I dunno.  Maybe I should make a more recent MAME backup than .36rc1 or whentfever I last bothered to burn all dozen discs (God, how many *is* it now? )..

Have to admit, I have come up with some odd bad sector problems.. but nothing that chk/scandisk couldn't handle.

[Spaced Invader]

Western Digitals don't like me...I've killed two. Both less than a year old.