Hard Drive 'End of days'

Was it really only April when I last had to talk about drive failures and backups. Well here we are in May its happened again. Different machine, different hard drive and a more spectacular death.

Yesterday afternoon I had several very odd 'hangs'. IE would just stop responding and lock up for several minutes. Outlook emails would pause for a couple of minutes before they would send and downloading new email was taking forever. I rebooted a couple of times to try to clear it and it kept happening. I did notice on reboot I would get a strange 'strangulated' noise from the computer. I tried to listen to where it was coming from but it would last less than second and everything was working.

Finally last night it just got crazy. Nothing was working. Everything was hanging and I couldn't open the Storage Manager to see if there was a hard drive problem. So I opened to case up and pulled the drives out and rebooted. No noise... dammit not sure which drive is failing. There's no clicking or ticking that I am used to but then a sudden thump and the machine hangs. Won't reboot properly either. So I pull the power on the data drive and now it reboots. Dammit.

So once the traffic cleared this morning I headed off to Fry's again to get me a new drive. While I was waiting I took the opportunity to reinstall Vista as I had hit my limit of OS crap. Right now I'm copying all the files from my server backup to the new drive. 138,578 items - 3 hours it says!!! Man I have a lot of stuff.

My backup software doesn't cope with open files and I don't always remember to close outlook when i go to bed so I think my email backup is a couple of days old which is a big shame. The old drive is deader than a dead thing. It doesn't even appear to spin up. So time to try the quick feezer trick to see if I can get that one PST file. Otherwise I can live with a few missed emails.

Suppose I need to check if the drive is under warranty too. At least I might get a spare out of the deal.