Some of you may have noticed the distinct lack of color at GU lately. Some might have also noticed that there wasn't a comic on Thursday (1/24). And where some have probably guessed that it was related to the computer issues I mentioned Monday, only a very few know what actually happened.

Well, my primay drive gave up the ghost. Having suffered through several clean XP installs, and outlived a handful of power supplies, I guess he just finally surrendered to old age. Now, in my mind it wasn't that old. I got it new in October 2004. But for as much hell as I've put it through since then, I probably aged the thing prematurely. It was a Western Digital Raptor 74Gig and it worked like a champ until last Friday (1/18) when it froze up and never returned. It didn't hold anything crucial to GU's continued existance. Though I dread the idea of having to commit to another Photoshop install. One of these days they're just going to tell me "no we can't give you permission for another install" and I'm going to have to rebuy the software.

Anyway, I handed my computer over to a local tech guy and he confirmed what I feared, the drive was just gone. The data on it couldn't even be accessed because all computer the drive was tested on refused to see that the drive was really even there. So, I brought it home, ran some more diagnostics myself, formatted and even zero-filled the drive. It has accepted another clean XP install, but it failed it's SMART status testing. Basically the only safe thing to do is to put it out to pasture. Poor Mr. Raptor he worked so hard for me.

I have another Raptor that was originally RAIDed with the one above but has since been transformed into to storage with fast seek times (go go video game drive). I've backed it up and am going to try an XP install there to see how it rates. Otherwise I may have to purchase a new drive before the site is back up to 100%. I'll keep you posted.

Heh that sucks. Do you back everything GU on a external drive or something? I just recently had a friend with a mother load of video games and songs and everything you could think of die. His hard drive needed formatting and he hasn't backed up his system on another drive so he was screwed.

Yup, GU is backed up to a Maxtor external. I don't do it every day though, so there's always the potential that I'll lose a few days of work. I mean to back everything up daily after the comic is done. But, **shrugs** I forget. **whistles**