Saga continues..

So, I put the hard drive into the freezer last night, because at this point frankly things couldn't get any worse..

About 12h later I extracted it and plugged it in; to start with it would hardly spin up, sounding like it was hitting a peak speed and then slowing down again and repeating. After a few power up and down cycles it started clicking and making a buzzing sound again (I'll get around to recording this at some point).

I think it's dead and beyond saving.

Fortuately, aside from the HL2 mod code, the drive pretty much only contained game installs, which I can demangle at a later date; also, these games all use the My Documents/Saved Games folder to store the saved information in, which was on another drive! That's one in the eye for the old 'wah! I want to save data with the games! wah! windows is making me use another folder!' people.

It's back in the freezer again, where it'll stay until my new drive turns up (a 500gig SATA2 drive to replace the 250gig ATA which has died) and I'll give extracting the data one last go... although I'm not feeling hopefull about its chances.

This means however that, until the drive turns up, I've got no games to play... guess I should do some coding at some point or something to pass the time [grin]