Hard Drive - Close call.

The other night when I was scrambling to practice some songs I needed to get down for a audition, I realized something wasn't right. My whole iTunes Library wasn't being found! Well, I didn't panic because I've seen this before and was fixable. All I need to do is reboot my computer; sometimes network issues wack it out the connection between iTunes and my network share temporarily. Anyway, after rebooting my computer it still wasn't finding them! At this point I made the semi-sprint trot downstairs to check out my server. It was then I realized something wasn't right. My data was there but performance trying to open the drive was slow and on top of that I was hearing some noise from the drive itself! "Uh oh.", I thought.

After playing (yeah, thats the technical term) with it for about 20 minutes I decided I better try and pull off data while its still running (fearing as soon as I powered it off it would never come back to life). So I scrambled to find any large capacity drives that I had available and immediately went to critical files. Seeing this drive had both my music collection and my life backup of pictures, documents and other stuff, I went straight for backing up the the critical stuff like photos.

I was able to pull them off without issue. However the rest of the data was a long tedious process. I had to constantly monitor sometimes the copy would fail sometimes it work work. At several points, I had to power off the drive so I could try and re-copy files off! The good news is I did have a full backup already on anotehr drive, but it was from a few months ago. I am now using that full backup (from 2 months ago) as my starting point and filling in all the new photos, files and MP3's from what I pulled off the bad hard drive.

After I pulled everything off the bad drive I downloaded and ran some diagnostic tools from Western Digital (the manufacturer of the bad drive). After confirming the drive had some bad sectors on it and was basically trash, I looked around on their site for warranty info. My drive out of warranty but discovered they offer a discount on a new drive as long as you enter in the previous models' serial number. Check that info out here.

Needless to say, I have a replacement 500Gb drive on its way! So by the time I get it, I should be back up and running and will be able to use this new drive as a redundant drive backup source.

You got to love technology eh?