Hinky's Revenge

I'm sure you remember the December Disaster. I lost a lot of stuff that was very near and dear to my heart, including:

• My UT2004 server, BITCH House 2004 (a very unoriginal name, yes thank you)
• My SOCKS code, a big, BIG part of the Proxy Project

Well, nine months after the disaster, Fortune has smiled upon the Dinkster!

Today I took down Experimental /// in order to add a USB 2.0 card to it (it was only capable of USB 1.0, seeing as it's almost ten years old). I found a Web cam that actually works on Linux and I wanted to play with it, but that's incidental.

While I had the box apart I went looking for that USB card amongst my huge collection of computer junk (note to self: always find the parts first, before taking the box apart). I found the card and a couple of hard drives. One was the Hitachi that died in December and the other turned out to be a good drive I had installed Vista RC1 on last year (I was never impressed with Vista and I'm not upgrading as long as I can avoid it).

I also found an old dual IDE-133 card that had been a great disappointment. This card was a dud if there ever was one. The manufacturer made a Windows 2000 driver and then promptly went out of business. But I figured I had an extra drive and a card to plug it into, so I slapped them both into EXP/// and fired it up.

Worked just fine.

I figured I had nothing to lose so I shut down and plugged the dead Hitachi drive in and booted back up.

ALL THE DATA WAS STILL THERE.

I don't know where the magic came from because I've done this a half a dozen times trying to recover that stuff and it never worked before. I think it's part Linux and part weirdo IDE card. Perhaps the card is just too stupid to know that the drive is bad.

I don't know and I don't care. I'm just glad I got the stuff back!

EXP/// will be down while I tinker around with the hardware and add the extra drive (not the Hitachi). It shouldn't be much longer.

And look out for BITCH House 2004! It's coming back, BITCHESSSS!!!!