I don't know why I decided to give Western Digital another chance last year. Their hard drives don't like me or something.

At any rate, I had a RAID 0 array of 4 Velociraptor 10k rpm SATA II drives and last night, I went home to find my computer displaying this message:

"No bootable device detected"

I opened the RAID manager and one of the drives listed as "Error".

No amount of fiddling, cable swapping or rubbing it gently caused it come back to life. It's dead.

For the most part, it was an inconvenience. I lost a few digital pictures, some LightWave models I was working on and all my save games for anything not Steam-Cloud enabled.

But it always sucks to go home to a dead computer.

I did the reinstall jig last night. Had to start with Vista and then do Win 7 because the Win 7 is an upgrade version.

But I got it all done.

Le sigh.