Community poll forum: When did you last experience a complete hard disk failure?

After reading the replies here, I must be very lucky!
In 6 years of computer use, I've had only 1 failure. That was about 3 years ago when the HD of my first computer (Gateway) seized. Bearings froze. Not a fun time. My local gurus were able to salvage nearly all of my info and the replacement HD was a much better quality. Since then I've built a new machine and my son has the old Gateway, which is still cookin'.

i was playing around with an old Acer-power 425s 486Dx2, cleaning it up inside, dusting it out etc.

i had unplugged all the power sockets, and removed the drives, putting everything back together again, i negelected tp plug in the HDD power cable back into the drive, after switching on on nothing happening i realised what had happened and plugged the drive into the power without switching the system off, not surprisingly it sparked and shorted out, frying the board on the HDD (cold to hot in 5seconds)

Moral of the story: SWITCH OFF YOUR PC BEFORE CHANGING CONNECTIONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My first computer that still works was an eTower 366is Win 98 ( now Win XP )that I got from an older sister. I change the HD to a Maxtor 160gb from 4GB. Now it is mostly used for websurfing. Now I record my favorite TV show to my new computer(check profile)and my last backup was less than a month ago. But at my job I had two Dell OptiPlex GX260 workstation HDs fail in the last year alone. Today with a new bug every hour backups are necessary so a HD can fail at anytime.

Need I say more? Those of you who are old enough remember the original virus that crashed your hard drive on what was supposed to be Michelangelo's birthday. Since then, having learned the lesson the hard way, we have had firewalls and anti-virus products which I vigilantly keep up to date and buy new every year. The $50 is a great insurance policy! After the internet on my husband's computer was hijacked by a spyware program, I added Spybot to my list of "safety" programs as well. We have not had a serious problem in many years now.

I had the controller boards on 3 Maxtor drives die last month. All three of them were 5 years old. It looks like the electronic component life ( assumed capacitors) has only a realtime life of about 5 years. All the drives were IDE and purchased at the same time and out of the same manufacturing batch. This helps confirm that it is a component failure. Luckily I have 2 drives left out of that batch that I can swap the electronics to teh bad ones and recover teh data...

Jerry

My hard drive read/write arm seemed to lose its ability to track. It would not boot, and a diagnostic run from a floppy confirmed it was bad. Fortunately, I periodically copied my critical files (digital photos & music) onto my 2nd hard drive. After the crash, I did a fresh install with 2 drives in RAID 1 (mirror) configuration, then got a USB hard drive enclosure to pull over any other files that were readable (retrieved about 80% of what I needed). Even with the RAID 1 setup, I am periodically burning my digital photos (my most valuable files) onto DVDs just to be sure. I will never go without RAID 1 again.

I got the same 41 error and my CD-RW could not be found, and I found out that it was due to installing IIS on my Windows Media Center 2005 OS. I thought it would work on it since it came with my OS disc, but I guess not. I wish there was a way around that...

Oh, and you guys need to stop blaming everything on spyware, viruses, etc. It seems like every answer I get to my computer problems is "Have you scanned your computer for spyware?" Most of us scan for that lol...

i've had two commit hara-kiri, taking much data with them. Both MAXTOR external hard drives, first one croaked under warranty, second one just barely out of warranty. I will never buy another MAXTOR product - I learned my lesson! very disappointed! Now it's just internal drives for me.

I made the mistake once; of using the /quick switch while formatting my HD. It became unusable. I tried on and off for a year using different tools to recover it, but no go.

Never again!

1) Our area had poor power grid and we got a lightning strike. Power dropped out 2x and spiked 2x - system tried reboot between. Hard drive (Maxtor 8GB 7200) required wipe & reload, but monitor (Cyrix(?))was a loss. Purchased a UPS/circuit protector (APC) and works well.
2) Purchased and installed new, but defective board. Logic controller burned out within first week or so, which gave me a "no can find disk" error. By time diagnosed, warranty was up. Info was still on the drive, just couldn't read. Disk working fine now - same Maxtor.
Yes, I recommend Maxtor.

I hate to do anything kinky like reformat a hard drive. I would kill any "friend" who did this to me, I wouldn't attend the funeral and I wouldn't send flowers. I'd call India for help.

I had a hard disk failiure and a motherboard failiure during a power surge. Since then I have purchased a ups (get frequent power cuts), a surge protector and a high end power supply to stop this from ever happening again. (I had no problem with forking out as they are all long term investments which should happily see me through my next computer)

When my disks failed it was one of the disks in a RAID 0 volume. The disk still spinned, the writing head could still move but the disk was as good as dead (could not format or write any data to it). Even if the disk hadnt failed recovery would have been difficult because it was in a RAID 0 array and i have not seen a utility that can cope with this. Luckily for me I still had the old 80gb ATA drive in my computer which i had before i went to raid. All my irreplaceable data was on it so i did not loose too much. I also had a copy of xp on it so i got by untill i got the replacement disk. It was fortunate that i had only had my raid 0 for a few weeks so it was relatively easy to recover everything.

Since then i have my RAID 0 array automatically back up and synchronise documents on the 80gb drive. I also back up my laptop on it because I realised if I lost all the work on it i would probably fail my design technology A level.

So in conclusion if you have raid have an old backup drive. A 20 gb drive is not too expensive and should be enough to back up those irreplaceable files.

My first and only COMPLETE HD failure was approximately 7 yrs. ago, on a very old, first gen Pentium processor, 450MB HD. It just started to die in stages, through phyisical deterioration, I later learned. It finally just gave up completely when I was online, blank screen and totally unresponsive to any and all attempts of command and repair.

Now, I use Norton Systemworks and other Norton progs to keep my HD in top notch condition, doing a Diskscan and repairs at least once a week, preferably 2 to 3 times a week. Have not had a single HD failure since I started the above.

I bought an 80 GB Iomega external hard drive for my HP Win 98 to store all my photos and to back up some files. The box said that it was for USB 2.0 AND 1.1. I installed the Iomega software and the free included software, Norton Ghost.

I didn't bother to read the system requirments for Norton Ghost and the internal hard drive crashed. I had to use the HP Recovery Disks and spend 3 solid days bringing the HD back to the way it was before Ghost. Now, I read all the system requirments BEFORE I install anything. It helps that I replaced that computer with one running Win XP/Home. I also replaced the Win 95 with a Mac running OS X-Panther.

My 80 GB Maxtor HD failed without warning exactly 10 days after the one year waranty expired.
I had backed up about two weeks erlier but i had just finished up-dating my programs and up-dating my passwords. What a pain I had to go to all the forums etc. and get new passwords because i hadn't backed up the new ones yet. I was surprised I didn't get a warning.
I Have Some Advice Backup Backup Backup Every Day!!
I'm Still Using the MrMirror program I've had since Win95
It works on My XP fine. I'm backing up every night....