I've had several catastrophic hardware failures in a row, which have crippled my ability to work on any of my projects. So here's what happened...

About 3 weeks ago, the in-house email server power supply failed. The ball bearing on the main fan gave out. I replaced the power supply, but then the server did not boot up. I went and replaced the motherboard. No dice again. At this point, I just gave up and moved the different email domains into Google Apps. So the email stuff is working again, except for the SMTP parts. Google Apps SMTP is a giant pain in the ass, and I haven't been able to get that to work at all.

The second failure happened when I was trying to recover the data in the hard drives for the email server. I had SQL Server 2008 running there, so I needed to get the database files off them. I was in the process of plugging the hard drives, one at a time, into my workstation, when I accidently dropped the workstation case. This killed the boot drive and a few of other drives. By kill, I mean that the platters were turned to shards, totally unrecoverable.

My code is safe as I had backups of that, and the repositories are on a Subversion server in my LAN. However my development environment is a total loss. All of my virtual images are gone, and so are my local Subversion working copies. I had the vitrual images in a separate drive, and the working copies in another drive. Both of these drives also failed.

I'm still trying to sort through what drives are working and which ones are not. I bought a new boot drive and installed Windows 7 Ultimate, so that I could at least browse the Internet and email at home.

I decided to just hold off on recreating my development environment, until we move into our new house. The house is supposed to be finished this Friday, September 4th. I will be getting my own office, and hopefully a new workstation. We are getting the tax credit for new home buyers, but most of it is going to be used for new furniture, since all of our stuff is over 15 years old.

It may not be until October 2009, before I can get my development environment up to speed. I will know more, after September 10th, which is the day we are supposed to be getting the keys for the new house.