Hard Drive Failure: it can happen to you!

[complich8]

I'd like to take a moment to remind everyone that hard drive failure can strike at the worst possible times.

Like it did for me, today.

I'm sitting here writing a paper on Leibniz and Berkeley, and their views on God's role in day-to-day life. It's due tomorrow at 5 pm, so I was down to about 22 hours left to work on it ... when all of the sudden, my network connection dies. Turns out, the system drive on my router/fileserver failed, taking with it a bunch of random stuff from my past that I'd have liked to keep around, but only had there, figuring it was a newer disk, so it'd be unlikely to die.

Well, wrong! The disk bit the big one, can't even mount the main partition on it anymore.

So ... let that be a reminder to everyone ... if you have data you don't want to lose, make sure it's in more than one place.

Fortunately, I had an older disk lying around unused, so I swapped that in and rebuilt my OS on that... but what a pain in the arse. And at such a bad time.

Now I'm going to be awake and hammering on this paper for the next 18 hours, writing incoherent babble instead of a decent paper. And why? Because my disk died! The bastard!

So, to keep me from going insane and slaughtering the masses in an orgy of blood and fire, I figure ... this has happened to other people too. So tell your story of catastrophic hardware failure! Join in the fun!

[Board of Command]

So I guess the message of your story is...

"If you have a hundred bucks to burn, set up a RAID 1. If you have a thousand bucks to burn, set up a RAID 5."

[RyougaZell]

The only hard drive that I own and died on me, died after at least ten years of use, heck, the computer wasn't even a pentium!.

But I did had a painful experience with a friends hdd.

Turns out we spent over 6 months doing a team assignment on programming our own personal agenda for a pocket pc. Everything from requeriments, to design, codification, testing and documentation.

We were 6 persons.

Judgment came and we had to hand over our project on cd. It was due to 9am. At 8am everything was ready. We only needed to burn and... voila!!! The hdd of the laptop of the team leader crashed, died and never came back to life!

We were like... oh shit... now what? Fortunately we DID had a perfect copy at another laptop... whose owner did not arrive... The guy did not arrive... so we thought of phoning him... and we got the message on the phone "this number is out of service due to lack of payment".

We were so screwed (later we found this guy had overslept....)

We went and told our sad tale to the professor and he gaves us 1 more hour, to see what we could do.

As the guy with the only other perfect copy was not a viable solution, we searched our other laptops and found a copy that was at about 80% of completion.

Resigning ourselves, we handed that copy. Worst was nothing.

Fortunately the professor still graded us with 80 points out of 100.

But heck, I believe I got a few years older that time.

PS:
Good luck with your assignment complich8.
Hope you finish in time.

[DB_Hunter]

Learn from me.

My hard drives never die.

Even so, when I was (man the past tense feels soooo good) studying, I made atleast 2 different up to date backups on seperate media. Usually when I got into the latter stages of a project or assignment I would sometimes have up to 5 different copies of my work in 5 different places.

[Lefty]

I had a hard drive scare a few weeks ago. My external hdd was acting strange for a few days then one day it stoped mounting. It took me about a good day of work to get teh ing working again. But i was definatly sweating heavily about all the work i have stored on it. This has made me consider getting another internal drive for my comp.

[Munsu]

One of my 250 GB external HDD is always failiing on me. At least I can always do a 'chkdsk h: /f ' on it and I can recover most of it, I always lose around 10-20 GB of shit though. The main problem is not that I actually lost the data. The main problem is that I don't know what data I did lose so that I can redownload it.