First Hard Drive Crash of 2001

This Page covers the . 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:
Ted Phillips said:
I did have nearly completed games for download, but I needed to wipe out everything from my computer. I had no other choice.

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:
March 31, 2001 - Computer wiped out
Lost:
Front Page 98
Back-up site
Thousands of Graphics
Image Composer
RPGMaker2000
RPGs​

April 1, 2001 - Computer fixed

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.

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