Wow that was the longest downtime in Fourside history! By the way January 15th was the 9th anniversary of this site so it was a pretty lousy time for things to go wrong!

So anyway, here's the story for anyone interested in what happened. After several months of instability, the Fourside server finally kicked the bucket. At first glance it looked like the problem was leaky/bulging capacitors on the motherboard.

Unfortunately it wasn't that simple.

Plugging the Fourside hard-drive into another computer to retrieve data produced sparks and smoke, things you definitely don't ever wanna see come out of a hard-drive. Any further attempts to power the drive simply resulted in more sparks, and more smoke. At this point I was pretty sure I was never gonna see my files again. I had a few tiny backups from a few weeks ago on a flash drive, but much of my personal stuff would have been lost forever. I didn't give up though! After a couple weeks of research and much help from Dalton we solved the hardware issue by removing a cracked diode from the bottom of the drive. The drive would now boot, but the data was in pretty sore shape.

At this point I was ready to start running data retrieval and hard-drive repair software and wasn't really expecting to get anything at all off of the disk. Almost by magic however, when I tried the drive back home in the computer Andrew lent me I was able to view the files! Copying data was tedious as the drive was super slow and would occasionally return an error or simply freeze the computer, but I managed to get all of my important stuff back, including this up to date copy of Fourside!

First thing I'm gonna do now is start looking for a nice high-tech new computer!

And build a server for Fourside!

Nice to see everything back in (almost) one-piece.

And a version that works perfectly with Safari ;)
Gratz on getting it back up.

Well, at least my old computer isn't complete shit...

Hah it's pretty screwed up, but maybe that helped it out somehow...

And Nick I thought this site looked pretty good in Safari. What's wrong with it? (Besides that Safari makes every site with light text and a dark background look like crap.)

New computer is coming! Here's what I'm getting:

ASUS M3A78-EM AMD 780G mATX AM2+ PCI-E16 PCI-E1 2PCI SATA HDMI Video Sound GBLAN 1394 Motherboard

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5400+ Dual Core Processor AM2 2.8GHZ 2X512KB Cache 65W 65NM Retail Box

Samsung Spinpoint T Series HD501LJ 500GB SATA2 7200RPM 8.9MS 16MB 3.5IN Hard Drive OEM 3YR MFR Wrnty

G.SKILL F2-8000CL5D-4GBPQ PC2-8000 4GB 2X2GB DDR2-1000 CL5-5-5-15 240PIN Dual Channel Memory Kit

Corsair HX520W CMPSU-520HX ATX Triple 12V 40A 24PIN ATX Modular Power Supply 120MM Fan 2X PCI-E

It's all going into my old (now cleared and cleaned) case.

No video card?

Nope, not yet. The onboard is a Radeon HD 3200 so it'll cover for now. I won't need anything better until Diablo 3 or Starcraft 2.

Quick message to anyone ordering from NCIX in PEI. Don't get express shipping. They'll take your $30 and ship it ground, which is only $19.95 in their shipping options. Kinda crummy.

Well I guess if I get my order tomorrow...

Let them know about it, and they'll refund you the difference yo.