I got up early this morning to check the status of a remote restore that I was doing for one of my company’s clients. Everything was wonderful until about 8am when my computer started making a strange humming sound. The hard drive light lit up even though nothing was actively accessing the drives (that I had initiated), the light stayed lit like something was really going to town.
Then the light went off, and the noise stopped. Whew!
Except when I clicked the link to my email program, it said “searching for program…” What the heck? And when I opened Windows Explorer, it told me that my “D”, “E” and “F” drives were missing. Now I know I hadn’t approved any vacation time for my hard drives, and that 500gb drive was probably less than a year or two old, but it was gone!
All of my stored downloaded software, email files and web work was gone in a blink!
Fortunately for me, my company offers, among other services, off-site / on-line backup services, and thus I get to use our own software services free of charge. Since I have been religiously backing up my computer on a nightly basis, I didn’t lose any files or email messages.
I did some quick research on new hard drives, and found that Best Buy had a 1tb (terabyte) Western Digital SATA hard drive on sale for $99.95, with a 5 year factory warranty, and that the nearest location had at least one in stock. This drive was twice as big as the one that crashed (A Seagate 500gb drive), 7,200 rpm with 32mb of cache, and all the latest improvements.
So I made a trip at 10am to Best Buy to get the Western Digital HD. The shelf was empty where the tag was at, so I went hunting for a helpful Best Buy employee who found me what might have been the last remaining drive in the store.
I took it home and put it into a spare USB SATA external drive enclosure, then drove it over to my server room, so that I could restore all of my files directly onto the new drive, rather than being limited to the speed of the Internet between there and my house.
I’m waiting now for the restore to finish (I had lots and lots and lots of gb’s worth of stuff backed up from the three partitions on that failed hard drive) and then I’ll drive back over to the server room to retrieve my USB enclosure and transplant the hard drive into my computer.
In the meantime, on Monday I’ll contact Seagate to request an RMA and return the old drive to them for exchange since it also was still under warranty until the year 2013.
