A moment of silence...

[Krom]

To celebrate the passing of an old friend of mine: My main installation of Descent 3.

Expired this Monday when the hard drive it was on failed.

It was 12. (Yes, I've literally been dragging around the same D3 install since 2000.)

So long old buddy, thanks for the ride.

[roid]

dude, how about a trigger warning next time.
so rude

[Tunnelcat]

Well, for crying out loud, reinstall it on a new drive. You can't just kill a classic like the Descent series.

[Top Gun]

That's extremely impressive. I mean, I thought I was doing pretty good with it having been four years since I had to replace my hard drive.

[Tunnelcat]

I was going to say I've never had a hard drive failure on any computer I've ever owned, but I don't want to jinx myself.

[Krom]

This was the first HDD of my own to fail, but it wasn't the first HDD failure I've seen (plenty to see if you work on PCs as much as I do). Because of that I had backups of pretty much everything important on the drive already, just not Descent 3 (because I have the original disks and even made copies of them too). The drive was just over 4 years old so that install of D3 has changed homes a bunch of times, but after I looked through all my spare drives and backups, it looks like this was the end of the line for it.

And if you are wondering about the 50 some odd pilot aliases I had in that install, before the drive died completely I saved a directory listing of everything on it so I can rebuild them all.

[Burlyman]

Rest in pieces.

[Tunnelcat]

Bye, bye, bytes.

[Isaac]

I've killed many hard drives, learning the hard way.

Pro tips from Isaac IT special(ed)ist:
Don't throw the hard drive to your buddy who can't catch.
Don't drop the machine while it's on. (The second time I did this was by accident: Threw a backpack hard on the couch, which contained a defragging laptop. Forgot it was in there. It should have been off, too.).
Don't drop coins onto their circuit boards while they're on.
Don't rapidly power the machine on and off, no matter how fun it is.

[Descer]

I've had both Ds in same HDD since xmas 1997.

[Alter-Fox]

And yet your signature.

[Descer]

What about it?

[Tunnelcat]

I've had both Ds in same HDD since xmas 1997.

What computer are those 2 geriatrics still being used in?

[Alter-Fox]

Well, I bet there are plenty of other programs on your PCs that aren't 'just games' to that you simply reinstall when you transfer it to another PC; instead of transferring a copy of the very first install... It makes it sound like you might not have 'faced it' yet .

Still impressive, though.

Sorry, I don't mean any offense, I just have a pathological urge to deconstruct these things.

[Descer]

486

[Jeff250]

This thread inspired me to get me off my ass and caught up with my own backups.