I got 99 problems and a hard drive is one.
Hey guys, which you might know, this computer I’m using is well passed its prime. I’ve gotten Cyclic redundancy error on the D: drive before, and fixed it with CHKDSK, but now I’ve got it again, and I got it bad. It’s – like we say in computer lingo – fucked. However, I’m running CHKDSK again, hoping it’ll solve it, but it’s literary taking forever. And I mean forever. Like, I’m not expecting it to finish before time as we know it has ended, and the sun has exploded. Cause, you know, It’s been going for more than 8 hours already. 8h is damn close to infinity.
So, because of this, I’m trying to not use the computer at all right now and just let Checkdisk finish. And that’s why there’s no update today, and for this I’m sorry. Guess it’s my fault entirely too, apparently I shouldn’t have formatted that drive. I really think that these hard drives are living on borrowed time, so I’ll try to backup as fast as I can.
(And if someone says “get a Mac” I’m going to KILL MYSELF…) 
EDIT: Status update, +24 hours and counting and CHKDSK’s still going. I’m starting to think this was a bad idea.
June 1st, 2009 at 6:26 am
Pff, forget Mac, clearly you need to start using FreeBSD.
June 1st, 2009 at 7:41 am
Hey Rasmus, get a Mac.
June 1st, 2009 at 8:09 am
Oh come on Waior! Now there’s no more glitchtown. :’( RIP Rasmus Pettersson
June 1st, 2009 at 8:42 am
@ Danny and Waior:
:nou:
@ Sam: And my tombstone will say “If he’d ONLY gotten a Mac…”
June 1st, 2009 at 9:21 am
A mac won’t save a broken hard drive. The only OS I could think of that might do that, is Solaris using ZFS
June 1st, 2009 at 10:55 am
Get a mac.
Seriously though, get a new computer. Your updates are few and far between already, we don’t need them to get any rarer.
June 1st, 2009 at 11:43 am
Honestly (or as honest as we get here), I’m not really in a position to just buy a computer, nor do what I want with this one. All I’ve got is this, which is the family computer, and I’m trying to make the best of what I’ve got. It’s hard
June 1st, 2009 at 12:10 pm
The only thing a Mac would have given would have been a spinning marble of death or a blinking folder with a question mark at boot time. However, he could replace the hard disk, boot with the Leopard DVD and quick format the disk then reboot again from DVD and tell it to restore from Time Machine and in 2-3 hours be right back to before the disk failed. Saved my bacon once!
FYI – Enough of the Mac vs. PC debate. A Mac is a freaking PC! It’s got Intel Core Duo2 or Intel Xeons, a PCI-X bus, USB, Firewire, etc. It can run WinXP/Vista/Win7 either dual boot or in a Virtual Machine. It’s just the OS is so much better then Windows because it’s BSD Unix under the hood! It’s got Unix security and it’s not nearly as vulnerable as Windows on the Internet. Yeah there’s security updates, all computers have security updates. Yeah there’s a Mac OS X botnet but that’s because greedy pirates tried to steal iWork and some hacker loaded a trojan into the bittorrent file and all those Newb’s got hijacked, they even gave the trojan permission to install! The funny part? iWork is not expensive!
Not even Solaris w/ZFS file system could save the day. It would likely save the data but the disk would still be toast. And ZFS requires multiple disks to be truly redundant if a disk dies completely. Time for a couple new hard disks.
June 1st, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Hey, why not put up a paypal donation link? Some of us would send you money to buy a new computer ya know! Push that starving artist concept!
It works if it’s promoted the right way. For example, the Blender community purchased the source code from the stock holders when the company went out of business. They raised more then they needed and started a non-profit foundation to manage the open source project.
June 1st, 2009 at 2:02 pm
I’ve been contemplating a donation button, but I don’t know… I think I’d feel too indebted by accepting random money for nothing. And then what if I’d miss an update or few – or possible in the future even end the comic all together – I’d feel very bad for everyone that’s given me money.
It’d feel better if I could make money, while giving something back – i.e. selling stuff. But even the thought of THAT makes me cringe, because I don’t feel my work has that amount of value.
June 1st, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Noooo curse you windows ><
Now you take Glitchtown from me?
I’d go with Linux: ext4 filesystem is great.
Anyway you said it yourself..we’re just so..awesome.
June 2nd, 2009 at 1:13 am
Start selling glitchtown t-shirts.. I’d buy one, or 10
June 2nd, 2009 at 4:23 am
You probably are not at the stage of utter desperation.
If you were, you could always try getting a liveCD of ubuntu or other linux distro and boot it on your computer. If that works, then you could try to mount the hard drive on Linux. If it works then pop in a USB stick and see what data you could copy over.
OR
you could try spinrite.
http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:59 am
+1 for thatguy: launch a liveCD of ubuntu, at least you should save your data
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/use-ubuntu-live-cd-to-backup-files-from-your-dead-windows-computer/
and goog luck
Then, on a new hard drive, install GNU/Linux: incredible ! now there is a graphic user interface ! you can spend months without open a terminal …
.
And the office suite OpenOffice.org is less expensive than iWorks