F's in chat for the eMachines Box's hard drive once again.

This was a sudden failure. The machine was really slow all of a sudden, which I thought might've been an errant background process, only for XP to tell me that the C: drive was not formatted! That's an error you don't want to see. I quickly booted into my Ubuntu (10.04 LTS, Lucid Lynx if you prefer :lince:) rescue drive and thankfully was able to copy off basically everything I wanted to that I hadn't had backed up, which included my Bryce projects, game screenshots and some saves, and some other scattered files here and there. When I checked the SMART status of the drive, I got what you see up there.

This is now the second hard drive in the eMachines Box that's gone bad. Thankfully, I'm a lot more prepared for it this time. What I plan to do when I get back from Wales is to get an IDE-to-SATA adapter in there and just use a modern SSD. I'm going through drives at a rate of one every two years, which isn't great, and IDE drives are only getting harder and harder to find. I don't need a ton of space, I just want something reliable, and hey, speed increases aren't bad either. (Fun fact, I have never owned a computer with an SSD in it. That's right, I am Stone Age in 2025, but to be honest, I've yet to really notice or care. I probably will when I upgrade though. Let me have my naivete until then.)

Time to obsessively back up all my shards and vaults in case my daily driver is getting ready to go as well. I love computers.