Hard Drive Failure and Success

This morning I woke up to a locked up computer. I rebooted and got a "Primary Slave Drive Fail" error on my boot screen. I shut the computer down to let it have a moment to think about what it had just done and powered it back on and it booted fine. I then headed over to my second drive where I like to keep things I had been meaning to back up onto DVD-R for the past six months, like say hundreds of song fragments and the source to several finished demos. I started copying everything I care about over to my main drive when I could hear the drive making a high pitched pinging sound, then the machine locked up.

I shut it down, waited and rebooted again, now pretty sure I was going to get fully boned out of all my awesome data. When I rebooted the BIOS didn't even list that drive as being installed. Super!

So as I made a mental list of all the things I'd lost that I needed to take the time to be upset about individually I took the drive out of my computer and stuck it in another one. The drive worked fine and I was able to copy all my data off.

I ran a checkdisk on it and found 4 bad sectors. I've now burned all my almost lost files to a DVD-R. Moral of the story: don't bother backing up, you always get a second chance.