More of the computer dramas...it never ends!
I just looked back through my entries, because I thought I posted about my computer dramas here, but I don't seem to have kept you guys fully informed. Oops!
At the beginning of March, my computer just refused to boot up properly. It was working fine one night, then the next morning, nothing. There was lots of family drama going on at the time, so getting it fixed wasn't a priority. My brother-in-law took the drives back with him (he and my sister came up for the custody battle, and they won!), and said he'd get the data off them for me. Well, I got them back on Friday, and he burnt the data from the drives to disk.
But the EA games folder on the disk? WAS EMPTY. There was nothing in it. So my flatmate pulled out an external drive casing (not the same as an external drive), and we put the drive into that...but it wouldn't work. It just wouldn't recognise that there was a drive there. We think that's because the casing is old, and it was being finicky. We hooked the drive up to the old spare computer (which is sooooo slow), and it recognised the drive as being there...but that it as empty. SHIT. We tried to run a data recovery program on it, but it said the drive was an unsupported format, or something. It was late, we were tired, I don't remember exactly. I'm going to be checking with my BIL today, and if he can't help I'll see if I can get one of my more techy friends here to help me out. If I have to, I'll pay a professional to retrieve the data! It has to be there. If not, I'll just cry.
I do have back ups, but they're from when I reformatted that computer back in late Jan/early Feb, which means I'm missing a LOT of game data, especially for Dear Diary. I have no problems making the Trousers go where I want them to with cheating, and because it's not a story, shit will just happen. I still have Vegemite Batmanigan, but not her children or house. I can start her over again, because I love her, and this time I'll have everything working properly from the beginning. I can even find her the same woman to love!
I can cheat the Strangetown Asylum people back to where the were, which isn't so bad, but it's Dear Diary that bothers me the most. I'd have to recreate Jen (because I don't have a copy of her), Zady and Landy's houses, the high school, pretty much everything that happened since Landy became a teenager. She's still a kid in my backups, so that's a LOT of work, and I'll do it, but if I can get the data back, I'd much rather do that. I have plenty of pictures of the houses, so I'm hoping I can recreate them easily enough, but getting Jen right will be hard - I think I remember what her stats were, but I'm not 100% sure. I knew I should have written them down!
So since this fuck up, I've started backing up the neighbourhoods I use weekly. A week's worth of play is much easier to recreate than 6-8 weeks worth. The other stories, I can easily fix for the story as to what happened. But Dear Diary is harder to explain the changes, and I don't want it to be like some soap opera where you get a voice over saying "Today, the role of Uber Bitch is being played by Skanky McSkankerson." Because that sort of thing just throws you right off and it's not the same. You know it's not the same!
If anyone has any ideas on how else I can try to access what's on the drive without paying a professional or damaging the drive, please let me know! I'll try to rebuild the games from what I've got in my backup version as best as I can, because I do NOT want to give up on these games. My new computer, Cletus, is working wonderfully, and I love him to bits. He better not die on me!
So I still have Tinsel Town and Erinsborough Bay working fine, and today I get my hands on lauriethemuppet's Happypants round robin. So there will still be games coming. But Dear Diary probably won't be updated for a while. The Trousers will most likely be the next ones I tackle from the "older" games, because I can age everyone up and send them to college. Except Bouncer, because he hasn't been born in the game I have! So who knows what we'll be getting...
Anyway, there will be updates happening, but there will be delays. I'm so sorry :(
