Good News: I was going to go to Icecrown Citadel for the first time tomorrow!
Bad News: My hard drive seems to have exploded.
Good News: I have my laptop!
Bad News: My laptop cannot play WoW.
Good News: Once I get a new hard drive I’ll get to install Linux and that means spending a good few caffeine-, frustration-, and thrill- filled days tinkering with it, and like the geek I am, I really enjoy doing that.
Bad News: Between that and fifty bazillion patches, it’ll be a little while before I have WoW access again.
Good News: I can at least blog up some RP stories and the like, right?
Four Good News points to three Bad News points. I’m gonna look at this from the bright side, then. I need a new hard drive anyway, it wasn’t particularly sizable and over time it became filled with more bad blocks than a satanic Lego factory.
…do not question my choice of comparison.
Not completely terrible news, everyone?
And the comparison made perfect sense to me.
The comparison could have been worse: it could have been made between the similarity of the Chip and Dale theme and the MacGyver theme.
Just sayin.
@ Rilgon – Good.
@ Klinderas – Some TIMES some CRIME… goes slippin’ through the cracks but these TWO gumSHOES…
The life size Lego Batman scares me. That’s way to many blocks in one thing.
Wish you the best with the rebuild. 🙂
;_;
Perhaps now would be a good time to invest in 2 x HDD’s (as they’re cheap and chips nowadays) and make a raid array. Mirroring them would give you a safegaurd against data loss in the future.
Can’t wait to hear how ICC goes for you (eventually)! I just did a PUG ICC10 for the first time, as beast mastery, and topped all damage meters, so I can’t wait to hear how you do!
Sounds like bad news, but what I like about linux is the easy way to overcome those frustrations. Just backup your home partition (I have an own partition for it and would recommend that) or folder now and then. If something satanic happens you just clean your root partition (or buy a new drive for it), reinstall Linux and then copy back your home. Then get the software packages installed that are not installed by default and the world looks fine again 🙂 No hours of downloading and patching wow. No need for raid arrays 😉
I have an external HDD for that. Made a script (a one liner) that rsyncs my home there and have no need to worry about my data anymore. All bookmarks, saved passwords, mails from thunderbird, all mail accounts, all wow… backed up by one keypress.
For KDE (which I am using) it is not a bad idea to not copy back the .kde folder. You lose you desktop settings and so on, but this is less frustrating than having other unlocateable errors. Might be useful for Gnome too.
And if you are (not you pike 😉 )using Windows, it is also a good idea to just backup the whole wow folder. Copying it back is all that is needed. In Vista and Win7 your account data and interface are not in the program folder anymore. Those should be under “documents and settings”.
Doing a complete fresh install of wow can take very long time.
@ Marc – my main issue is I don’t have enough external HD space to copy over the Home folder so I must be selective. But, you are right in that that’s a great idea.
And I’ve had bad luck in the past with copying over the whole WoW folder so I tend to just stick to a fresh re-install of it… takes a while, but also clears up any weird lingering errors!
I, too, enjoy the rarely-trouble-free event of rebuilding/reinstalling; it’s oddly therapeutic. But the fact that you’ll be able to upload some RP stories….SCORE!! I enjoy reading those even more!
are pickin’ up the tracks…No case to bigs no case too small..when you need help just call…
Ch-ch-ch-Chip ‘n Dale …Rescue Rangers …Ch-ch-ch-Chip ‘n Dale …When there’s danger…
I’d offer to send you one of my spare hard drives but, as the interweebs is full of strange anonymous people you wouldn’t want to give an address to, that would probably come across as just too weird… 😀
Um… I had my hard drive fry over Christmas Break… actually it exploded Christmas Day. Three days later I had a new hardrive in my computer. That sucked.
One thing I found though (if it will work for Linux) is that all I had to digitally download was Wrath and I was able to go. Mind you, you will have to be logged into your WoW account, but that’s not a bad thing by any means. I couldn’t find the CDs for the base game, had BC and Wrath sitting next to me, so I went with a DD and had the game in about 2 hours fully patched and ready to play. Considering I would have spent about that much installing the base game and BC… a fair trade off. Haven’t seen any issues with that install yet.
Just have fun digging up Mods again. I suggest making a list Pike 🙂 And you’ll still find things you forgot you used. Which reminds me… *scurries off after a few more mods*
With support for major destros of Linux being very good now, I don’t think you’ll be spending too much time or energy installing it. It takes about 3-4 hours for me, with a decent amount of customization. But getting WoW to run on Linux might take much longer. I tried so hard to do it, but gave up eventually. I don’t like Windows all that much, but I’m forced to use it for Wow, Netflix etc.. It’s pretty impressive that you can run WoW on Linux.
Satanic lego factories are where they make those boxed sets that have everything you need except for ONE piece.
Sorry ’bout your hard drive, Pike. It’s good that we’ll be reading about the forbidden insides of ICC soon, though!
Remember, blue fire on the floor is still fire! Don’t stand in it!
Hope you get another chance to hit ICC soon–the first wing’s awfully fun and is just loaded with Hunter Loot.
As a fellow Linux/wine/WoW user, I share your pain.
However, I have found (for me) the best way to mitigate the horrors of a fresh OS/WoW install…
With the prices of HDDs dropping like rocks all the time, it’s nothing to install a second drive. I copy all my WoW stuff to it (Everything under /World of Warcraft). Whenever there’s a new patch, it gets copied, too. And on occasion, I copy the whole kit n’ kaboodle again. That way, when I need to reinstall the OS, I can just copy the folder over to the .wine folder, and away I go, patches already installed, and fully up to snuff. I also copy needed drivers (I use Nvidia graphics, so its *.run file goes in there), and other packages I’ve made for my own setup customizations. As for wine itself, I compile it myself, and make a package. THAT is also stored on the second HDD.
Of course, I also use Slackware, which makes it a touch easier to compile your own stuff, and setup things the way you want, without the GUI getting in the way. However, from DVD boot to having a full 64bit Linux OS and wine and WoW takes < 20min.
As I said, I share your pain…somewhat. Remember the ALL COMPUTER MANTRA: Backup. Backup. Backup. Then make sure you have a backup.
Did you remember to backup? And last of all….Backup.