Life

I'm home, for all of you who were not informed by my e-mails, phone calls and personal visits. I haven't updated for a while because I've been settling in, recovering from jet lag, and wrapping presents.

And playing a few games.

However, today I can find no joy, because a great and terrible cataclysm took place that really, really, REALLY ruined what has otherwise been a fine example of a week. This disaster is my own Mt. Saint Helens, an Atlantean scale catastrophe (well, at least in my limited outlook on things).

Raijin bit the dust, HARD.

Raijin, that work of love that was the PC I built myself, randomly suffered some odd symptoms this morning. Concerned, I shutdown and restarted. Raijin failed to boot. Then Raijin booted and Windows informed me that it needed to check one of my disks for errors. It did so, and did a lot of deleting of things that made me uncomfortable (and rightly so). Windows booted, and I thought at first that all was in the clear.

I watched as my desktop came into view. And I thought all was well. That was, until about 15 minutes later and the start menu still hadn't appeared. It turns out that about 50% of the vital functions of Windows had been deleted, including Task Manager, the Start Menu, Search, and everything short of the kitchen sink.

The brilliant piece of art known as Windows found a way to destroy the beautiful redundancy of even a RAID array. You have to give Microsoft props for that, that takes skill.

The result? I'm not a happy camper, not a bit. There's the possibility that the whole thing might be related to a part of faulty hard drives, but I can't be certain until after I reinstall Windows. The whole thing really puts in jeopardy the merriness of my Christmas, as well as my programming plans for the next semester. Given Raijin's history, it hasn't exactly been a staple of trustworthiness. Not to mention that I can't play some of my favorite video games.

So at the moment, I'm mournfully watching as Setup formats the new RAID array.

Blargh.