Another hard drive failure. Ticking noises too - this one's almost definitely a drive failure at the hardware layer. I decided that enough was bloody enough and bought a brand-new 250 GB unit from Fry's, and incredibly, it took less than two hours from the time I got home for everything to be back to normal with an extra 90 GB of storage space.
You can rest assured that I'm putting all the virtual machines back on here. XP, Vista, and two different Ubuntu flavors, plus a local .Mac disk and some more of the movies and ripped TV shows (every ep of Coupling and Father Ted both!) now that I have room on the local drive coupled with adequate backup space for the whole thing. I guess I'm making a permanent jump to the quarter-terabyte world...this drive is literally a thousand times more capacity than I had in the hard drive of my first Mac fourteen years ago. ("Moore's Law...been very, very good to me.")
Good thing I passed the bloody exam, hm?
