awwwww
*hugs*

At least you can still snag retail or OEM copies of 7... but yeah, that really sucks man. Hope it all turns out alright with the data recovery.

Good luck with the recovery, Gabe! Is the drive physically broken?

Yes, but only the power socket, so the data should still be available for saving.

That sucks, but its a good excuse to get a new and fast computer. Now lets hope for a christmas miracle so that all data can be recovered

I'm old fashioned, so I really liked my Windows XP and the 1028x764 resolution... <:3

i use a 1920x1024 resolution...and its not all bad learning a new OS. at least try to get windows 7, its not too bad from what i've heard. it still uses the same desktop format for layout as XP and vista. its windows 8 that is more like a smart phone setup with a mouse interface...

Take shelter in Windows 7. It works about as good as XP.

I hope that everything will work out for the better, and may the new year be a bit happier then this years christmas.

Sorry to hear that, Gabe. God Jul anyway.

Thank you my friend, God Jul to you too. :)

Not all hope is lost. You can set up an XP shell to work off of. A lot of artists do that.

That sucks, Gabe. Sorry to hear that.

Though I am among those who, after having tried Windows 8 for about half a year gladly went back to Windows 7. I just couldn't cope with the new UI.

Btw. don't you have any backup solution in place yourself or why do you need to send the broken HDD in? (Honest question, as I know few people who use their PC for creative purposes and don't have some contigency plan, like a NAS or keeping regular backups on BDs or such.)

But whatever, still all the best and merry christmas.

I do have back-ups, especially of the game project, but I don't do back-ups every week so I have lost a lot of work with the Gabrielle Trading Card Collection.

Ah, I see. Thanks for clarifying this, Gabe. I hope all works out in the end.

Again, best wishes and regards.

...that sucks. I hope you'll get it working again and that all will go smoothly! Good luck!

So all the game project you worked on is lost?

No, thankfully the game project is the one thing I back-up basically every time I work on it on daily bases.
But I have lost a lot of art related to the game, which I never had a chance to add to it.

Man that suck but just have to wait. This morning it was not snowing and then it just started snowing because I wish for it. maybe you should wait for some type of miracle to happen

don't worry, things won't be as bad as windows vista was. 7's a great program and 8 is supposed to be even better, and i've got lots of people I know that have a window's 8 computer and say it's great.

Good luck with recovery o:

i'm sorry... wish you the best of luck and i cannot wait to hear more about the look on the specialist's face about whats on the HD

Choices, do you get a new 2T drive for $100, or an entire second hand refurbished desktop from a dedicated computer shop with 80G HD for $100.

I ended up with a 3T drive. .XP is fucked with it, cant access it at all, had to do all the Windows backups using teh ubuntu install.

Really sorry about the drive loss Gabe, hope its something as simple as a Mobo side interface faliure, as doing a board replacement is expensive, apparently due to the drive software is stored on the platters themselves at the factory. So, lose teh decode circuitry,a nd the replacement one unless its an identical make and firmware revision cant access teh data.

As for dives failing, a few minutres after completing the 100% back up of over 1.5 T of data, and rebooting the machine, the hard drive that kept teh previous system back up, being used as temp and swap, falied totally. So now Im back to only having two copies of the last years data, and 3 copies of the last 15 years data.

Dont get a laptop. Last week someones machine came in with a dead hard drive, theyd sat on the machine.

Hope things get better soon for you, thank you for posting, and Windows 8 is the new Vista, get Windows 7 whatver you do as you can b pretty sure 9 will be rough at the start.

*hugs*

Win7 actually isn't that bad, in fact once you switch to the 'classic' theme (or at least one of the non-aero themes) it's a lot like WinXP except slightly faster. (Really. It runs faster on my ancient computer than WinXP did, even though I'm still using WinXP motherboard drivers on it. Not sure if it's faster on this hardware than Win2K was, though... Yes, I've actually kept this heap of junk going for that long.) Avoid Vista like the plague, though, ugh.

What parts of the computer actually failed? Just the HDD? (If it boots and passes POST with the drive disconnected, even if it complains about the missing drive, then it's probably just the drive. In that case you should still be able to boot from one of the many Linux Live CDs available, and at least use it for things like browsing and listening to music and such until you have a new drive installed.)

There's other diagnostics that can be used (for example, if it does nothing at all, there's the PSU jumper test), but yeah.

ow, sorry to hear that:/ I hope the recovery goes smoothly, I have xp myself

*snugs and cheek nuzzles* Poor kitty sorry to hear about the crash and I hope to all things good and holy that your able to have the issue fixed quickly as well as the safe recovery of your data.

Oh man that sucks!Sorry to hear about the HDD being expensive to recover and that ur losing WinXP in the process,..i understand how that feels. 8c
*hugs*