Hard Drive Blues

Just before Thanksgiving I started converting my music library to MP3s, with the eventual goal being the purchase of an iPod. There were several issues with this plan. First off, I have a lot of CDs. Second, the 60GB iPod is really, REALLY expensive, in my opinion. And third, this whole thing requires me to purchase an Apple product, which is simply against my principles. But I forged ahead, ripping CDs night and day through the holidays. This ritual continued right up to Sunday night.

I'm about 80% finished with the whole task. And then I saw it. While ripping an excellent Sloan CD, my screen froze, and my 6 month old hard drive started making a repetitive sound. There was no response to keys, so I did what I had to do -- I slammed the power switch. When I rebooted, for a second I thought things were fine. The drive showed up in the BIOS, but then I got it -- "No valid boot.ini." This was followed by a black screen and that same repetitive noise. I frantically scrambled to find my hard drive diagnostic disc from Seagate. I ran the tests -- hardware failure. I try all the tricks I know, but nothing even will recognize the drive. It won't boot, I can't access it from a boot disc, nothing. Luckily the drive had a 5 year warranty, so a replacement is on the way. In the mean time, I bought a really big new replacement drive, and I'll use the other drive as a backup. I had all my email and our documents backed up from about 3 months ago, so luckily the losses weren't huge. I should probably have seen this coming. My friend Eric had a similar experience a few months ago. I helped him through his crisis without considering that maybe it was a sign. :)

Oh, and about all those MP3s I was making? I have a 14 DVD backup made one week prior to the crash. Had I not had the backup, I might have been inclined to stop listening to music and using computers in any way, shape, or form. At least for a while.

Moral -- Make backups. Always. New drives fail. Seagate warranty = good.

Bret