Well, it seems my WD Raptor 150GB drive has up and died on me. I took a 2 hour nap today and when I woke up I found my computer had restarted itself for some reason and the boot screen greeted me with the message “Primary H.D.D. Not Found!”. Well crap. I had to run open workout at the gym but when I got home I opened up the computer and swapped the SATA cables (I have two internal drives). Upon reboot the computer made it to the “OS Not Found” message, because the HDD it was now successfully detecting as the primary drive is not the one with XP on it. Upon leaning down next to the drive bay, I finally heard the “whirrrrr – CLICK! … whirrrrr – CLICK!” repeating itself. Bah.
I’m not a stranger to hard drive failure, although this time nothing showed up on the SMART test that is performed every time I restart the computer, and I make a habit of restarting it every 2-3 days. The boot process displays the HDD SMART status and if any serious problem is detected it hangs up and notifies you. That’s how I avoided the failure of a previous (much older) additional internal hard drive. The most recent HDD trouble I had was with my laptop two years ago.
Fortunately I should not have lost much. I mostly kept applications and the OS on my main drive, every month I would move unused files to my secondary drive. Being that it’s the start of January, I made that move a few days ago. In addition, I signed up for Mozy.com’s online back-up service last year and I back-up my data every morning. Of course, I’ve never had to use my back-up before so hopefully it’s all really there like it’s supposed to be!! Hah.
I’ve purchased another hard drive to replace my Raptor, none other of course than the WD 150GB Velociraptor, which prices in at around $100 less than my original drive when purchased two years ago. Ahhh technological advancement. It should be here by Tuesday so I can get to re-installing XP and all my stuff. Well, I was kind of considering a reformat anyways – thankfully I put it off because it would have really sucked to go through it all just to have to do it again.
Don’t forget that hard drive failure is an inevitable thing. It’ll happen at some point so be prepared. I talked about this back in 2007 when the first terabyte drives were starting to make their rounds.
Well, a forced partial vacation at least…
The contingency plans // Feb 2, 2009 at 4:04 pm
[…] of hard drive failures so far. My laptop hard drive failed and more recently my desktop hard drive bit the dust. In both instances I was able to recover pretty much all of my data and continue on without much […]