I ended up having to reformat and reinstall The Wife’s hard drive. I tried the recovery console (chkdsk, fixboot, and fixmbr) and I tried the repair option that’s part of xp setup. None of these fixed the “disk read error”. It was a good thing I had just installed everything the week before. Four hours of work last night and she only lost a few days of email.
This fun little incident has motivated me to get a UPS and to look into all of the new backup/system recovery options in xp. I balked on the UPS a few weeks ago as you need a super deluxe one to get any amount of up time with large monitors. I’ve decided that the monitors can stay on a basic surge protector, but the PCs are going on a UPS. (Mine and The Wife’s anyway).
If you tried to access the site’s root url (http://thechunk.com or http://www.thechunk.com) earlier today, you may have noticed that you got a 403 – Forbidden response. Apparently, Avid decided to move me to a new and improved server last night, but neglected to configure the web server correctly. They somehow forgot to include “index.php” as a default directory index page. I can’t be the only one who was affected by this. Anyway, for some reason, it took them several hours to add one filename to the apache config file and bounce the web server. Sigh.