Two days ago, I had the pleasure of having my computer crash while I was trying to print something. No problem, I thought, this happens sometimes—after all, I do mess around in the command line enough to actually screw something up now and then. I hold down the power button on my iMac until it shuts down, then press it again and hear the familiar Apple “ding.”

I was then greeted by a folder icon with a question mark on it.

Somehow, my computer had lost the ability to find its own hard drive. My husband and I worked on my computer the rest of the evening—about seven hours that night—and several hours the following day before we could get it to see the drive at all. We still couldn’t boot from it, of course, but at least we could wipe it and reinstall the OS.

We finally succeeded, after three tries. The install kept freezing at 2% or so.

I had a two-day-old backup, so I still have most of my data. Time Machine is a godsend, but I turn it off when I play WoW because it brings my frame rate down to around one frame per seven seconds. That’s quite a problem when you’re healing nine other players while fighting Onyxia. I basically lost a weekend’s worth of work, which sucks, but isn’t horrible.

Running a surface scan revealed that after zeroing out my drive, I still inexplicably had corrupt blocks on the drive. My hard drive is probably going to physically fail for good sometime in the near future.

Until I can afford (in money AND time) to get a new drive for my computer, I might have to lose another day or two here and there, relying on hourly Time Machine backups to save my butt. Development on SimpleMap and all of my other projects has pretty much come to a halt for the next week at least.

Trust me—I don’t like this any more than you SimpleMap users out there do. I’ll do what I can to get 1.2 out of beta soon.

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