Alright, the hard drive’s life has been restored!

At least, I managed to squeeze enough life out of it in order to back up all of my files to an external USB drive (which took over 24 solid hours…). So everything is safe now!

Thus far, I haven’t bumped into any corrupted data, so I would like to say that no files were actually lost in this whole fiasco.

Unfortunately the drive is not actually fixed. Since the bug that caused it to lock up in the first place manifests during boot up, the only way to keep the exact same problem from happening again is to not turn off my computer. Ever. @_@

Therefore. I haven’t turned it off since I restored the hard drive. It’s getting rather hot in the last few days, so I’m praying it will hold on just a liiiiiiiiiittle longer.

Problem is the poor machine leaks memory and thrashes terribly when I leave it turned on without a rest. ESPECIALLY when I try to work on hi rez, large art files, such as Joyride pages. :C So it’s reeeeally slugging along, and just barely surviving.

Besides which, I can’t update Joyride anyway because the internet isn’t working on that computer (I’m updating this from my laptop again). Not sure why — I’d have to do some cable rearranging and rebooting to diagnose that, but… yeah, I can’t. D:

So TLDR; what I’m trying to say is: I recovered all my data (yay) but I still can’t update Joyride until I get some new hardware and internet back (boo).

I guess there’s simply a limit to how far you can push failing hardware, and that machine has hit it.

I apologize for the break in updates, but, well, I guess a computer is never really going to chose a convenient time to have a total meltdown…

As of now you can consider Joyride as being on Christmas break. It should return around 2010!