This Page covers the early April 2001 crash.
For other variations, please refer to Hard Drive Crash.
The First Hard Drive Crash of 2001 was an especially devastating data loss event incurred by corrupt operating system files in Windows 95 on the IBM Aptiva computer system used by Ted and Nick Phillips. The event occurred on March 31, 2001.
For many years, the actual date of the event was unknown. The date was estimated by contemporaneous blog posts at Thingamabob.com2 by Ted. One made March 30, seems like a normal post discussing bugs on the web site. Another, in another section on April 5, states:
On March 21, 2024, while building general timelines of events for various calendar years, Ted Phillips stumbled across contemporaneous notes and checklists detailing development made for the web site Thingamabob.com2, covering dates from March 19, 2001 through May 4, 2001. The relevant note states:
This crash was previously conflated by historians with the Second Hard Drive Crash of 2001, which took place only a few weeks later, but conflicting evidence between the two events and new testimony has led to the official recognition of that as a separate event.
This April 2001 crash resulted in complete loss of the following creative works:
Prior to this crash, Ted Phillips had attempted to package The Return to the Lost World: Jurassic Park for a web release through Thingamabob.com2, but its ~70MB file size presented a challenge to find a host who offered enough space within their free tier. For many years, it was believed that the source footage had been lost in the Millbrook Fire, resulting in this crash amounting to a total loss for the project. However, in 2022, Ted Phillips finally discovered that the source footage for The Return to the Lost World: Jurassic Park had survived to the present day.
For many years, the actual date of the event was unknown. The date was estimated by contemporaneous blog posts at Thingamabob.com2 by Ted. One made March 30, seems like a normal post discussing bugs on the web site. Another, in another section on April 5, states:
Ted Phillips said:
On March 21, 2024, while building general timelines of events for various calendar years, Ted Phillips stumbled across contemporaneous notes and checklists detailing development made for the web site Thingamabob.com2, covering dates from March 19, 2001 through May 4, 2001. The relevant note states:
This crash was previously conflated by historians with the Second Hard Drive Crash of 2001, which took place only a few weeks later, but conflicting evidence between the two events and new testimony has led to the official recognition of that as a separate event.
This April 2001 crash resulted in complete loss of the following creative works:
- Shrinking Down
- Skelly
- Sciémon (series)
- The Glob (3D version)
- Heat
- Our Solar System
- The 3D Movie Maker Movie
- Magic School Bus
- Bongomon (2000 version)
- The Prisoners (3D version)
- Biomon (series)
- 2001 edit of The Return to the Lost World: Jurassic Park
- The Lost Pyramid
- Pokémon Black
- Pokémon White
Prior to this crash, Ted Phillips had attempted to package The Return to the Lost World: Jurassic Park for a web release through Thingamabob.com2, but its ~70MB file size presented a challenge to find a host who offered enough space within their free tier. For many years, it was believed that the source footage had been lost in the Millbrook Fire, resulting in this crash amounting to a total loss for the project. However, in 2022, Ted Phillips finally discovered that the source footage for The Return to the Lost World: Jurassic Park had survived to the present day.