Woes

I currently have a massive headache that is making it difficult for me to think effectively, so I’ll apologize in advance if this post ends up not flowing very well.

As many readers of this blog will be aware, in addition to my personal channel, I have a channel called VlogRamen over on YouTube that I run with my long-time friend, Stefan Chin. For a multitude of reasons, I’ve not had the time or energy to post videos over there for a little over a month. I had planned to post a return-to-VlogRamen video this week, then last night happened.

As I was attempting to fix some issues with my video driver, my computer popped up a notice that a “fatal exception” somethingorother had occurred. I rebooted my computer and was confronted with the legendary Blue Screen of Death. Attempts to boot in Safe Mode resulted in the same error. Unable to get into Windows at all, I started running some of the low-level diagnostic tools available to me from the boot menu and was shortly informed that something was wrong with one of my harddrives.

A few more tests confirmed that the harddrive appears to have crashed. But I still have the other harddrive, right? Well, not really.

I had the two harddrives set up in what’s called “RAID 0″. Basically, this means that rather than my computer seeing them as two separate harddrives, it sees them as one big harddrive. The biggest advantage to this setup is that it allows the computer to write information to the drives faster than either one of them could handle on their own. The problem in this case is that files end up in pieces on two different drives, and if one of the drives goes down, none of the information is accessible.

For idiots like me who neglect to back things up properly, this is bad news. There is some hope that a data recovery service may be able to extract the salvageable files for me, but there are no guarantees and it can be quite expensive. If I’ve really lost everything on those drives, it’s going to be a huge setback for me, especially with my music. All of my music project files were on those drives.

This also leaves me without a working computer at all. (I’m currently borrowing my mom’s laptop.) I had my laptop stolen in San Francisco last November right after YouTube Live! and now my desktop has bitten the dust. Until I can secure myself a replacement harddrive and reinstall everything, I have no way to edit videos, write music, create graphics or anything.

I had been tasked with creating some logos for a fictional pizza delivery service to be used in a music video that’s being shot this weekend. I was actively working on putting out an album of my own for DFTBA Records. I had a whole lot of footage ready to go for a handful of videos for both VlogRamen and Arandavision. I had pictures galore from Kasey’s recent California visit that were ready to uploaded as a photojournal to this very blog. That’s all gone now. Moral of the story? Back up your important files. You hear it all the time, but seriously: back up your important files. Don’t be stupid like me.

Beyond my computer troubles, my mom was taken into the emergency room earlier today, as a result of dangerously low blood pressure. I don’t have a whole lot of information, but last I heard from my grandparents, she had had a number of tests done, but none of the results were back yet.

Many of you have expressed kind thoughts to my mother and our family over the last four months or so, and I’d like to thank all of you. Especially on the internet, where people can be quite insensitive indeed, it means a lot when people say wonderful and uplifting things.

Computers and Technology, Day to Day Life, Family