I have to reinstall HyperSpin... :(

[Dazz]

The hard drive that I had HS installed on decided to crap out... Another Seagate drive. :mad:

Anyway, I have to now install HyperSpin... Wow, I just realized how much of a pain in the arse it is to do a fresh install. I re-downloaded the torrent and got it set back up. Now getting all of the new themes is a serious chore...

I must say that the past couple weeks I have been extremely busy and haven't been online much. Checking out the downloads I see some pretty freaking impressive themes. I am really glad to see that the community is coming along very nicely.

[BadBoyBill]

Hit up brian he probably can send you everything like before if you want so you dont have to start all over, this is like the 3rd or 4th bad luck thing to happen to you, lemme think.
Lost all your rom drives
Big computer crashes
then this, I might be missing one tho.

[brian_hoffman]

Dazz,
Whatca need.... I got it all

[joebells]

aye aye aye if anybody needs a backup plan its you. Get yourself an external or two and backup your stuff onto the externals. Vista has some auto backup stuff I believe. You can also get lots of free stuff to do it too. I unfortunately don't know what to recommend to you for windows as I use a linux server to store and backup my stuff. I think there is a rsync thing for windows. Its a great little protocol(?) that can compare two directories and only copy the files that have changed and if I remember correctly it only copies the bits that have changed on individual files too so if you only changed a tiny bit of something in a huge file it might only have to copy a little bit.

But I definitely think you need a backup solution. And maybe look at your setup. Do you have a large enough power supply? Are you cooling the drives properly? Being careful with them when you get them and not banging them around? I personally only order retail drives as when you get an oem it generally isn't packaged very well when shipped and that can lead to early drive death too. There is also storagereview.com where you can go and look at peoples reliability data for different drives to give you an idea of what might be ok to buy.

[billpa]

If anybody is in need of solid state storage...its Dazz. Sorry to hear another one bit the dust. You should definitely have some redundancy though. The little bit of investment for a few extra drives will save you headaches later.

[Dazz]

Bah, I haven't had that much bad luck...

The big one was my rom drive dying, but Brian helped me get back on my feet. My main computer dying, that was expected and gave me a reason to finally spend the money and upgrade my computer for once. It really didn't die... 2 of the caps on the mobo popped, so the machine was slowly becoming more and more unstable. The processor & ram are fine, just need to get a new mobo and then I can hook my daughter up with her own computer. The drive that I just lost was a replacement from Seagate on an RMA from my previous drive loss. So it looks like they just sent me a bummed drive. It just seems worse since everything hit in a relatively short time period. The new machine is a C2D E8400 @ 3ghz, Asus P5K Deluxe, 8GB PC2 1066 and 8900GT running Vista 64. Everything is running extremely well.

Thankfully the only thing I lost was my HyperSpin stuff... Most of the stuff is easy to get back. I just downloaded final torrent from the FTP and also all of the themes from the downloads section via FTP. Just having to manually unzip and edit the .xml files is what I am not looking forward to. :(

I ended up going out and getting 2 new 750gb WD drives, one for my newly built main computer and the other in my external enclosure and hooked up to my newly re-built MAME cabinet PC. So, I am good now with new drives... Next week I am planning on getting a couple more 750's and setup a raid 0 or 1 on my new computer.

So, if anyone has complete game XML's and one that has only games that we have themes for, that would help me out tremendously.

[Goalies Rule]

check my post here

http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/forum/showthread.php?t=598&page=2

[Dazz]

check my post here

http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/forum/showthread.php?t=598&page=2That is a huge help! Thank you.

[billpa]

Raid 0 is not redundant. Raid 0 is when you stripe 2 or more drives together to improve performance. Raid 1 is mirroring. That is redundant but you are writing to disk twice which = 2x more time to write data than normal. Probably not that big of a deal on just a MAME cabinet. However, if you can find a good backup program like BH suggested, you could schedule a nightly backup of your disk. I have a program for my computer (Mac) that backs up my data...even makes the back_up bootable just in case the drive takes a crapper (cant really afford to have to start from scratch here).

HTH,
billpa

[joebells]

ahem jb suggested :D and I agree raid 0 is only really useful for speed gains it really gives you twice the chance of failure since you have two drives you are counting on you have twice the chance one goes. If you have any data you absolutely care about I would personally use a couple of external enclosures and get a program that will automatically backup to them. Then if something were to happen like the power supply frying your drives and such you still have your data on the external.(and if its really important like pictures rotate a drive to a completely different spot in case of a fire)
All the HD manufacturers just send back refurb drives for rma's :( I've had to do it twice and I just use them as recorded tv space for my media center I do not trust them with anything I care about. Total crap on their part but what can you do.

[billpa]

sorry JB:top:

[Dazz]

Alrighty, I got all of the themes that have been approved in the downloads section and added them. Now I just need to set my testing environment back up.

Oh, I added some editors notes to downloads that need to be re-packaged. These themes had a root folder that is not within the HyperSpin path. Themes should be easily un-zippable into HyperSpin/Media/MAME. HyperTheme corrects this for themes created in HyperTheme, but existing themes will need to be re-packaged.

[BadBoyBill]

I noticed the same thing, big note that HyperTheme will not be able to open the themes for editing if not packaged correctly.