Death of a Hard Drive

It must have been crawling along for weeks if not months, but I never noticed it until last night when the hard drive that holds all of my source code enlistments decided to take a dive for the worst. I've put SpinRite on it, but at current pace it is predicting completion in 30+ days and most sectors are coming back Unrecoverable... sigh I don't think I'm going to stop working for 30 days. And how dare it stop working on my birthday, too... :-/

Fortunately, it is just source code enlistments to IIS5, IIS6, IIS7, and several other projects, which means I am only losing the client-side cached copies of source code along with any of my unsubmitted changes, and the only corruptions I care about are in those textual source files. But, not too many files are in that state, so recovery should not stressful. I just need to get a new hard drive, re-establish and re-sync my enlistments, copy/edit over unsubmitted changes, and I should be good to go.

Right now, I am very glad that a long time ago I segregated all my source code enlistments onto one partition and separate from my OS or my own "My Document" partitions - recovery and backup procedures are very clear-cut depending on the partition - I don't back up the OS and just reinstall whenever necessary; I backup and restore the "My Document" partition; I don't backup the source code partition and re-sync whenever necessary.

So, I will be busy recovering from this ordeal when the replacement hard drive arrives and until then, I am going to be handicapped from doing productive development at work (I don't consider email "productive" work). Maybe I will get time to spend on blogging, newsgroup, or investigating Sharepoint questions. Or maybe I will play around with native/managed Interop on IIS7 and post some code on that. :-)

Oh, the choices, choices...

//David