Platter Splatter
I was more than a little annoyed to have my new desktop machine's hard drive crash this week. I'd had a few strange lockups here and there, but had put them down to an over-abundance of plastic rulers in my apartment complex. Then everything suddenly got stupidly, ridiculously slow, with simple apps like notepad taking about ten seconds to start. I checked for viruses, spyware, loose cables and even dead hamsters, but everything looked fine. I then ran a disk check, and the machine died. I rebooted, and it crashed again. And again, this time at a different percentage in the disk check. And again. Right about this time, I realized that I had a serious problem.
A computer losing its hard drive is like a human being having their heart explode. The brain of both systems will continue to work for a short while, but without major new supplemental infrastructure and quick treatment, they're pretty much toast. This analogy starts to disintegrate when extended to include backups, memory, the nervous system and RAID arrays, but it accurately conveys the dire situation my machine was in without a main system drive. I obviously needed a new one, so I started looking into warranties and replacement drives.
Having built the rig myself, I didn't have one single company that would help me get a new drive. I called the place where I'd bought the unit, NCIX, but they were exceedingly unhelpful. I was told to print out a damaged or incorrect delivery form and fax it to them, and they would get back to me... sometime later. I didn't really like the sound of this, so I picked another option and called up the company that actually built the thing - Seagate. They're a pretty big company, and there was information on getting a replacement drive right on their website. I even tried to set up an Advanced Disc Drive Replacement, where I give them a credit card number and they send me a replacement drive right now, and I have 30 days to ship the broken drive back. Unfortunately, that particular program is only available in the USA, so it wasn't to be.
About this time, my original drive started working again. I'd borrowed another drive from work to prove there wasn't a problem with the motherboard, and when I plugged the first hard drive back in, it booted up. This was a dangerous moment, as a lesser man might've thought everything had magically fixed itself. I try and bear in mind that anything that magically fixes itself can just as magically break itself again. This was good advice, as the drive crashed soon thereafter, but only after I managed to do one final emergency data backup.
The end of the story (at least for now) is that I went out and bought a new drive at lunchtime. I grabbed a Western Digital, because getting another Seagate felt like going back to an ex-girlfriend who had set my car on fire. Reinstallation went pretty smoothly, although it'll take a little while to get everything set up again. As for the old drive, I'll try to get every last bit off it before I send it back to Seagate to be replaced. Then I might use it as a hot backup, a RAID mirror or sell it on Ebay. I might even donate it to the homeless.