Old Laptop is D.E.D. Dead!

[WILL]

It hapened yesterday a couple of hours after getting home from work. I got home and opened up my laptop and started using her has per usual. Worked a bit on my latest projects, did a litle surfing, downloading eps of my fav shows... then suddenly it freezes up... ok... nothing new, it does this all the time. It's on the fritz afterall... start it back up... the bugger deleted all my cookies in FireFox. :x ...boy was I in for a supprise....

It wasn't too long just fiddling with it and using it some more that it crashed once again.... that was it... last time... started back up got a text mode screen telling me that 'WINDOWS\System32\ntoskrnl.exe' was missing... I was like crap! Alright looks like I have to reinstall my Windows system files hope I don't lose my data in the process.

A couple of tries with the Windows CD later and 'grrrrr.... Click! grrrrrrrrra.--click!' .. the bloody harddrive went all screwy... Right there I knew... It was done. The fat lady sang. My laptop was no more.

I just lost a months worth of work, Night Stalker 2 --port to Lazarus, Build 6 & 7(which I was so proud of), Scorch2D ported to JEI-SDL in azarus(to be featured in parts in my upcoming tutorial on how to make an atillary game) and all my nice personal 'toolbox' units I made up to help make any new project easy to put together, things such as a graphics unit, very nice input unit, font unit that uses the graphics unit.... all gone.

Oh sure I backed up alright... before I went to sea... but you all know when that was... too long ago. I didn't lose Cyber-Crisis thank that! :shock: My modded version of JEDI-SDL is safe and my earlier versions of Scorch2D and Night Stalker 2 under Delphi using DelphiX are still intact... but i'll be like starting them all over since I had to do a whole wack of work to get them changed over. I even made them more modular(more Object Oriented, NS2 is an old, old project....)

So there is my sad sad story... sorry to those that were hoping to see Build 7 of NS2... it might take a while before it's at the point that I had it... I downloaded the copy that I uploaded to PGD... It'll help me a bit to start the project back up towards what I had... Would have liked it if I had posted the AI routeens I used though... a ton of juicy copde there.... *sigh*

Well you guys have all heard this before. One more harddrive gone up to HDD Heaven. :roll:

[aidave]

that sucks
i know what thats like all too well.


umm... gonna go make some backups now

[savage]

It's always bad news when a holder of cherished memories passes away.

I hope the new one gives you more joy.

[Robert Kosek]

I am so sorry to hear that Will.

That's actually half the reason I thought of writing a backup utility that monitors your projects, then zips them to an external/other harddrive. For now it's just an idea though.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Hi Will,

*hugs*

That reminds me of the time, I did what we are all advised to do and kept my drivers up to date...

I dutifully installed the latest version of the VIA IDE drivers... rebooted. Win2K came up with its 'Disk in drive needs to be checked' during boot up... ok I thought, maybe the drivers have picked up an error the old ones missed, so I let it strutt its funky stuff... and then I watched in horror as it trashed the drive... every single file was gone... it was my main work drive and I lost everything.

Thankfully, earlier in the day, I'd had a near miss and I'd managed to make back up copies of my latest projects and other important stuff, but the drive contained all my Turbo Pascal code... at that point, it was over 10 years of libraries, examples, algorithm prototypes and all sorts... gone in an instant, along with all my spare time projects.

Devastated was an understatement. I even took the drive to work and had it running on a recovery system for a couple of days... nothing was recoverable :-(

What made it worse was the fact that I had the chance to skip the disk check and didn't.

[vgo]

Sorry to hear that.

I once lost something important too on a HDD crash and since then I've been kind of obsessed with backups... I have RAID0+1 on my work rig, I take backups to the fileserver which has RAID5 which in turn is backed up on DLT tape. Haven't lost anything really important for a long time..