Crash of 2009 & 'classic' gaming

[JamminR]

Until now, in my 24 years (wow I'm getting old - I was 12 when I got my first TRS-80 4k CoCo) of experience dealing with personal computers, I've only had the bad experience of one true hard drive failure. Again, until now.
Without warning, my 300gb SATA drive of my primary pc has died.
What aggravates me the most is I had JUST moved over most of what I stored as a backup from a rebuild I was still in process of. (See my 'enough' post)
Within another day or two, I was going to back up in a compressed disk image the 6gb of drive data I'd need to do a full recovery in case of something like this.

I'm currently using a program called MHDD (part of the http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ tool set) to attempt recovery, but seems as though at this point even if it CAN recover the data from the, as of this moment, 85 bad sectors after 5 hours of scanning with 63 hours and 24 minutes bad guestimate remaining, I'm betting my replacement drive will have arrived. (It died one month before the warranty expired.)

I've lost several old Lua projects I had just considered tinkering with again to conversion from Gmod 9 to 'current'. (Yes, start from scratch, but but, I like at least seeing how I did it the first time)
I lost my personal archive of various script and even ULX lua code. (3 years of my own collection, more than the ulx download archive contains I believe)
Years of My Documents files.
I'm an old school PC person, so had several Winamp 2.9x plugins that would play tracker files from the 80s computers. That so far is what bugs me the most.

Which, speaking of '80s', leads me into my next topic.
I'm now typing to you on a P3 laptop. This laptop has served me well for 2+ years (got it for $50 used). It won't play, and I really don't want it to play, the games I had currently been playing though (Rigs of Rods, Super Mario Kart, (Gmod, not so much), World of Goo, a few other heavy GPU intensive games.) won't run on this PC.

SO, I've just installed a wonderful set of games my wife gave me. I hopefully won't complete them before the drive gets here.
Several years ago my wife bought me the Sierra collections of King's Quest 1-7, Space Quest 1-5, and Leisure Suit Larry 1 - (I forget, it's on a shelf on the other side of the office).
All come with DosBox that installs with them so they'll run.

I'm about to start KQ1. Wish me luck!!

[Megiddo]

Ouch. Hope you can recover those pictures...

As far as lua code, if it's anything by me, I probably still have it.

But, look on the bright side, you get to enjoy all those classic games again!

Let us know if there's anything we can do for you to help.

[JamminR]

The lua was actually some stuff from my pre Ulysses days, and some during very beginning.
The predator vision stuff. Stuff that though I'd not ever truly look at again, I had hopes of redoing modern style.

Currently, mhdd is still scanning my drive.
It's got 586,114,704 sectors to scan.
It's scanned 2,857,910 sectors since my post yesterday, and found 439 big red X sectors (which I believe means unrecoverable. It was at 85 last post

Oh, also, I remembered I've had one additional drive failure. The drive was a secondary drive I used to store downloads/other junk. Not as bothersome as this one or the other, so that's why I didn't remember it.

Seagate's sending me the same drive that I can tell. Google doesn't give much results other than a name change. Old was a 6v300F0, replacement is a 7v300F0. I can only hope the 7 means newer generation, less chance of failure.
I was hoping I'd end up like last failure and get an extra 50 to 100gb out of it.
(few years ago, I sent in my dead 40gb and got a 80gb in return)
No such luck.

[JamminR]

Using MHDD from the ultimatebootcd, and UBCD4Win (live Windows PE), I managed to repair enough bad sectors to get some data off the drive.
Wasn't a full backup, but a select few folders.
I'm now running on my primary rig again. Went and picked up the replacement drive from UPS (required a signature) tonight after work.

Still rebuilding, one app at a time.