Missing In Action - presumed dead

[Dr.Flay]

Calamity
One of my drives took an arrow to the knee this morning.
The drive with my UT on it.

At least I have a backup and two versions I edit with, so all is not lost.

Damn SMART monitoring ain't so damned smart!

[Creavion]

At least you have backups (unlike some others here on the forum ... ). I think you were lucky things didn't turn out worse. I also have two backups on external HDDs, each 1 TB from intenso. Already saved me once from a complete data loss. Was totally worth the money!

[Hermskii]

I have read plenty that suggest SMART is awful and in fact designed to hide errors from you till past your warranty duration. LOL. I sound so conspiracy theorist like. LOL

Sadly, I think this one is true. SMART has warned me about bad drives several times and saved the day. It has failed me though far more often. I researched this plenty but I think you can find the nuts and bolts to my findings if you Google something like "Spinrite vs" and read up. I have read more than enough to agree with the same things I have seen in my long IT history to say I'd rather have SMART than not have it but I know it does fix issues and fails to report them often and then all of the sudden it is too late.

Good luck.

[Dr.Flay]

Oh there is an irony here too

My main system has (had) 3 hard drives.
I have been emptying the oldest drive, which SMART has been warning me about, and has been developing lots of bad blocks.
Now the one I was intending on being the permanent replacement dies. "C'est la vie"
And at least the map I'm working on is in an email I sent (older but I still have a lot to do anyway).

The drive is stopping the BIOS finishing the end of the boot stage, so my best bet is to get an IDE external box, and connect it after Windows or Linux has booted.
I just thought, I'm very glad I emailed my Monsterspawn config!
So glad I've always partitioned and used multiple drives (even my old Amiga had 2 HD's).
In nearly 15 years this is my first major computer bomb, so I feel fairly lucky.

[Saya-chan]

Ahh... the thing with failing hard drives. I've been through this so many times. I tent do do backups every week or so, or as soon as I notice any new bad sector (currently, my 500GB SATA drive has 803). I hope it won't die on me just like the two that came directly before it, and under the same circumstances.

I've been told that getting a hdd that doesn't fail is just a matter of luck, anyway. And I get a lot of luck from looking in the trash (I have to resource to this due to lack of money), I just got two drives that are in perfect health. One of them is used for the primary OS, Linux, and the other is where I put my backups.

[Dr.Flay]

Sometimes the failure is due to the operating conditions. This is one of those times.
My drive was in a stack of drives, and I could see the temperatures were way above a sensible level.
The drive that failed was in the middle, and was regularly reaching 68c.
The drive below it is the one with bad blocks (I should have removed it long ago).

Hard drives will always finally die, because they are magnetic media spinning at high speed. Two bad things in one box, that gets hot.
And yes they all are manufactured with bad blocks.
A low-level format with the manufactures HD software, will sometimes bring a dying back from the near-dead.
There are also a few useful 3rd party tools that can reclaim bad sectors, and even gain you more space if your drive has been limited.
These maybe very useful for you Saya.