Bad blocks! Bad!

Well. It had to hap­pen, right? After twenty years of active com­put­ing, a hard drive has gone south on me. Oh, I’ve had drive hic­cup before, but I’ve had time to retrieve my data before the plat­ters froze up. And I’ve lost more than one Zip disk to the Click of Death. Inter­est­ingly, I don’t think I used flop­pies enough to keep track of cat­a­strophic fail­ures. But I’ve never lost an entire hard drive until now. And actu­ally, that’s still not entirely true. The thing will work for a few min­utes, but it even­tu­ally encoun­ters what I think must be a bad block, and starts to power cycle with­out end. I’ve tried numer­ous util­i­ties, I’ve tried refor­mat­ting it (I am told that will iden­tify and lock out any bad blocks), I’ve tried tap­ping it firmly on the side. No good.

It is, of course, out of warranty.

This is my first drive fail­ure, but unlike so many first times, I had a backup. I backed that drive up nightly (using Apple’s .Mac Backup pro­gram, which is not the best, but served in this case), so I lost one import of dig­i­tal pho­tos, which I hap­pened to still have on the media card in the cam­era. (You see, I stopped hav­ing iPhoto erase the pic­tures off the card when down­load­ing, after hear­ing about a guy who did that and had iPhoto crash while down­load­ing the images, and so he lost them, in both places.) So really, I lost nothing.

I count myself lucky. And I will be buy­ing another drive posthaste, so I can con­tinue with the backup plan.

It hap­pened to me, it can hap­pen to you. You’ve been warned.