Goodbye, hard drive

It started with a funny little error message, waiting for me when I flipped on my home monitor after work yesterday. "Could not write to F:\ms$t"

Well, there is no such directory on F: (an external hard drive), nor should anything have been writing to F: -- click OK and confront the frozen screen. Can't even evoke Task Manager. Reboot.

Safe mode wouldn't start. Windows XP repair couldn't get very far. I finally got it started by shutting down the external drive, and then to be safe, restored the system to a few days in the past. (I do appreciate System Restore.)

I have to confess, though...about a week or two ago, I noticed a few odd sounds coming from the external drive. "Hmm, I wonder if that means it's going to developing problems?" I even thought. But did I do anything about it? Hmpf...

Everything else was working fine, so I powered up the external drive again. No problem until tonight. This time, when the odd sounds began, I dove for the power switch. Maybe F: can be survive, maybe it's just having a bad week, but all of my important data is on it, including my backup files.

I ordered a new external drive (320GB for $99, very nice). I'm crossing my fingers that F: will give me just a little bit more time -- time enough to hook up the new drive and copy everything over -- before it fails completely. No power till then, my old friend.

With that niggling worry in the back of my mind, I decide to catch up on the blogs.technet feed, and I come across "Why can't it 'just work'?" by Chris Avis. At a time like this, how I can sympathize with that!