Oh, this isn't fair at all: this is the drive that died today, which is why some of the images on the system won't show up right now, and there might be a few remaining gotchas that might prevent the system from operating normally. I don't think so, but with partial restores you can wind up breaking things without even knowing.
It isn't fair because this image isn't going to be compelling to Image of the Day visitors. I'll try to make up for it with another backlog clearing tomorrow or some day soon.
The sharp-eyed amongst you might see that this is a Quantum. It's a 9 Gig SCSI, U2W.
Over time I will probably take this thing apart to see the guts. It was manufactured 9/16/99, so I guess in theory it's still under warranty, but like I'm gonna do anything about that now. I forget which vendor of the week I bought this one from.
You just know this thing has a rated MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 200,000 hours or so, maybe even 300,000 hours. No question but that it should have lived longer. It's a server-class drive, used in a server, but not even used as hard as some server drives are used.
The drive began to report errors a few days ago, which gave me some time to scout out and get a replacement (an IBM 10,000 rpm deal). Today I decided to do the work of getting the new drive in, which was just in time; in the process of recovering all the data, it began failing a lot harder. As a result, I did lose some data. I have backups going back a way, so I was able to restore an awful lot, but there were a few files missing from the last week. That's why some of the images are missing.