Hey guys, Darc here.

First off, I’m sorry about this. It seems the middle to end of January is not a good time for us. Chaos stalks our home like some large, stalky thing.

What am I talking about? As Matt mentioned earlier, Godzilla, my computer of around 18 months or so, is dead. He hasn’t been the same, really, since the fire around this time last year. He’d been dropped, while running, by the cleanup crew and needed to have his hard drive replaced. That same hard drive finally gave out this last Wednesday.

I was almost finished with Issue 9, page 19 when Godzilla froze. I couldn’t even get the Task Manager to come up. So, I turned him off and, after waiting a bit, turned him back on. Except… he didn’t come back on. Boot drive error. It’s happened before.

Matt came home that night and did the normal fixes (because unfortunately I know little when it comes to fixing computers) but no dice. Tom helped us out with the recovery after the fire and said for us to come on up. But unfortunately, it just seems too far gone. The discs spin, the drive clicks, but the computer can’t read it. We’ve tried it in different computers. We’ve tried switching the controller-board (we’d bought two of the same hard drive last January – long story). After swapping the board, the computers recognized there was a drive but, they still couldn’t read it.

End result…

Godzilla’s dead and we’re unable to access the master copies (the 150MB copies of the pages we need for printing) of pages 6-19 of Issue 9.

Why no backup? Because we found out that our backup, a Linux computer upstairs, got fried by a power surge as well. (Lesson, check your backups and check to make sure your backup power supply device is working. Always!) The reason we have the masters we do is because I’m still paranoid something will happen to the house while we’re away and insisted we bring a copy of the files with us to MFF.

So, what’s happening now? Well, a new computer has been bought. On the advice of Tom and Trish, we went for an iMac. Matt can explain to you our reasons why if you’re so inclined to tell us how PCs are better or such. In the end, it came down to the computer we were planning to build later this year would cost almost as much as this Mac and we got the three year Apple Care and the Time Machine backup system on top of it.

We still need to rebuild that Linux box though.

So yes, step one is done. The new computer is up and running. While things are a little different, I’m familiar with Macs from my time in the library sector so, not too big a deal.

The next step is the data recovery. We did find a company in California who can do the recovery. They’re one of the few out there. Trouble is… the cost is high. VERY high. Matt’s going to try one more thing Monday and if that doesn’t work, he wants to send the drive out. I’ll have more on that when we find out just what we’re looking at.

What does this mean for updates? Main side, you will continue along uninterrupted. Supporters, please bear with us as we finalize the data recovery bit. The plan is to see what the analysis is – can the files be recovered or not – before setting a date. If they can, we’ll be back as soon as I get the page 19 master back on my drive. If not, I have to redraw it as well as the remaining missing files. We’ll see.

There are a few pictures of Godzilla, the drive, and Mothra on my
Twitpic account, I don’t have the FTP running yet.

For now, I’m sorry again for the delay and hope you’ll stick with us. Thanks guys and take care!

“If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee — that will do them in.”