You know what sucks?

[Necro]

When you design an ingenious theme for a front end, get it all working right, have a Illustrator file with tons of layers so you can easily edit it and align everything perfectly...

And then have your      hard drive die the day after you begin organizing and backing everything up. 

Eliminating both this theme, your website design files, and a bunch of other crap that you won't even realize was on there until you need it.

Best part is that there is financial information on the drive...and I can't even format the sucker completely so I can RMA it and not worry about some nut-job stealing the information. 

Yippee-f.

[HaRuMaN]

Use a giant magnet.

[Malenko]

back up sooner?

[Necro]

From what I've read, short of a magnet that would rip apart the drive the magnet won't do it.  Rare earth magnets aren't even strong enough to screw up today's hard drives.

And I know that Mal...I was in the process    

[HaRuMaN]

Have you tried hitting it?

[Malenko]

have you tried hitting it any sort of data recovery?

[CCM]

Does the old freezer trick still work?

[J_K_M_A_N]

What brand is it? If it is a seagate try their seatools for dos. I ran that before I sent my drive in for warranty. It cleaned the drive...just took a while on the bad areas.

J_K_M_A_N

[ark_ader]

I've had this happen to me and I was going to but instead I will be kind, understand the situation and say 

[Necro]

It's actually a variation on the click of death, so the drive is completely inaccessible (i.e. won't even spin up and allow it to be accessed/recognized at all).

I did manage, using the freezer trick, to reaccess it once.  But it went back to clicking so fast and so many sectors were read as bad I couldn't pull anything off.  After a refreeze, it seems to be completely screwed and wouldn't restart so I could clear it.

Luckily, WD is letting me do a 'Secure Information' RMA.  So, I scan the drive, write a letter of what's on it, and send that in and the RMA goes through.  Hopefully.  They did ask for a letter on company letterhead. :/

[Malenko]

I was just being a dick earlier, it does suck when that happens and Ive had it happen a few times. I still dont back up as much as I should, but I find it safer to back up to older 5400 10GB  IDE drives then the million RPM 2Gb cache Sata II 2TB drives *shrugs*

[Xiaou2]

Sorry for your loss.

 Personally, I would have just RMAd the thing normally.  I think it
would be quite rare that WD employees would have the time to try
to rip apart & rebuild a drive to then try to take info off of it,
without being caught... especially when there is no guarantee that there
will be anything worthwhile to get off the drive in the first place.

 Telling someone to do a "secure rma'  would seem much more
dangerous Imop... as you are telling them there Are things of worth
on that drive... thus may be worth someones dark efforts to do the deeds.

 I wouldnt worry too much though.  Id bet something like that is
extremely rare.
 

[ark_ader]

Sorry for your loss.

 Personally, I would have just RMAd the thing normally.  I think it
would be quite rare that WD employees would have the time to try
to rip apart & rebuild a drive to then try to take info off of it,
without being caught... especially when there is no guarantee that there
will be anything worthwhile to get off the drive in the first place.

 Telling someone to do a "secure rma'  would seem much more
dangerous Imop... as you are telling them there Are things of worth
on that drive... thus may be worth someones dark efforts to do the deeds.

 I wouldnt worry too much though.  Id bet something like that is
extremely rare.
 

I disagree.

These hard drive companies make it all sound too easy to say it is safe to put this and that data on their drives.

If it goes tits up the drive manufacturers should put it right!

That said I ALWAYS have a striped raid in my development system and another pen drive that is used for incremental backups just in case.

Once bitten twice shy!

[shateredsoul]

your momma!?  

Ok ok.. totally inappropriate but I couldn't help it.  That sucks man, hope you can recover the financial info.

[TOK]

I had a 4 month old 1tb Seagate crap out and I was able to blow it out with SeaDOS... Kind of a pain in the butt, since you have to make a boot DVD to run it, but it worked.

Drives are so cheap now that if I was worried about someone recovering personal info, I would have just smashed it and taken the loss. I've actually had great luck with WD. This was the first Seagate I bought in 10 years after reading about how abysmal their quality had become.

The refurb they sent back is just used as for downloads and junk I don't want crapping up my main drives. I don't trust it.

[Necro]

I just faxed them over a scan of the drive and some other details (including why I can't send it).  Should be good to go.  If it's a problem, not a biggie.  Was only a 400gb drive.