This Page covers the April/May 2001 crash.
For other variations, please refer to Hard Drive Crash.
The Second Hard Drive Crash of 2001 was a 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 sometime April 15-23 or May 2-15, 2001.
The event was triggered when system administrators attempted to upgrade the computer's existing installation of America Online using a CD that had arrived in the mail. Upon restarting the computer after installation, Windows would no longer boot.
The date is estimated based on gaps in file timestamps between those dates, recollections of that time period, and contemporaneous blog posts at Thingamabob.com2 by Ted. On May 28, he specifically placed an event "early [that] month":
For a time, scholars themselves assumed that the First Hard Drive Crash of 2001 and the Second were actually the same event, due to how close they occurred in time, dates of surviving files, and that the date of the post itself might be in question. Posts on that web site relied on manually-supplied dates, potentially leading to a practice of the authors lying about when something was posted or backdating posts that were not made as contemporaneously as desired, but the title "No Memorial Update" heavily suggests a relation to the Memorial Day holiday. An earlier post on April 14, which occurs after the previous data loss event, does not promise any RPG, but does make other promises about updates, suggesting the event took place on a later date. However, it's possible that authors writing on April 14 intended updates for Memorial Day but did not make sufficient progress in time, leading them to blame the previous data loss event in early April for the setback, rather than any new event.
This late-April/early-May 2001 crash resulted in partial loss of the following creative works:
These projects were able to be partially recovered from recent backups, resulting in only several days of progress lost.
The event was triggered when system administrators attempted to upgrade the computer's existing installation of America Online using a CD that had arrived in the mail. Upon restarting the computer after installation, Windows would no longer boot.
The date is estimated based on gaps in file timestamps between those dates, recollections of that time period, and contemporaneous blog posts at Thingamabob.com2 by Ted. On May 28, he specifically placed an event "early [that] month":
However, company scholars note that the post could easily have conflated an event at the end of April as occurring during May.Ted Phillips said:
For a time, scholars themselves assumed that the First Hard Drive Crash of 2001 and the Second were actually the same event, due to how close they occurred in time, dates of surviving files, and that the date of the post itself might be in question. Posts on that web site relied on manually-supplied dates, potentially leading to a practice of the authors lying about when something was posted or backdating posts that were not made as contemporaneously as desired, but the title "No Memorial Update" heavily suggests a relation to the Memorial Day holiday. An earlier post on April 14, which occurs after the previous data loss event, does not promise any RPG, but does make other promises about updates, suggesting the event took place on a later date. However, it's possible that authors writing on April 14 intended updates for Memorial Day but did not make sufficient progress in time, leading them to blame the previous data loss event in early April for the setback, rather than any new event.
This late-April/early-May 2001 crash resulted in partial loss of the following creative works:
These projects were able to be partially recovered from recent backups, resulting in only several days of progress lost.
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