1:07am EST: Update. It’s bad. This was the message from support:
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Upon initial inspection, the unit was making audible platter skipping from the hard disk. Unfortunately this disk will not make the clone. Disk to disk clones are fairly intensive on platter drives. Due to the age of the drive, it’s almost guaranteed that the clone will do more harm to the original drive than good. At this point, it’s recommended to perform a restoration from the current backup you have over to a newer system.
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I am thinking BEST CASE is a restore from the last known good backup which was 4/20 oddly enough. My May backup is corrupt, I should have noticed at the time but I didn’t. But even that will have to be on all new server hardware/software and I am pretty sure there will be code compatibility errors up the wazoo, which is well beyond me. I suppose I could do the old restore, then try to contract a freelance vbulletin expert and maybe pay them a few hundred bucks to go through the code and fix that, maybe? I don’t even know if that makes sense. But I do know that usually if you throw enough money at something it can be solved. If this is the case I will be asking for help.

Either way, unless support comes back in a few hours and says they were able to clone the drive or something this is not going to be a pleasant thing, a fast thing, or maybe not a thing at all. I guess if none of that pans out I might be able to at least restore the “user” accounts to a fresh forum install if y’all still wanted a place to hang out? Shit. I don’t really know what to think/do at the moment but I will keep y’all updated here. -Chef


Initial Post:
Database went to shite or the server in general. Not sure yet.
Tried to download a current backup and it was almost half the size it should be.
I have a known good backup but it was from about six or seven weeks ago. =/
The server is very old and it’s not as easy as just moving to new hardware. The forums are old and modified enough that going to a new machine will mean new OS, huge version updates of things like Apache and PHP and I am fairly certain that would break a lot. Well beyond my abilities anyway. Hopefully the scans will run and stuff and everything will be fine like 8 months ago. More when I know more. -Chef