Whirrrr.... Whiiiiirrr..... Keeeerrrplunk!
Hard to describe that sinking feeling you get when you hear those dulcet kerplunking noises emanating from your laptop's hard-drive... You know what's coming... more kerplunking, more whiiring, followed by the inevitable drive-death. No point going into denial: you know it's coming. If you're lucky, you might have a few more hours of use of the drive as a going concern, with which you set about yanking as much stuff as possible off the drive. If you are unlucky, like I was this evening, you get no notice, and wind up with a bluescreen and the irritating (perhaps even nail-biting, depending on when your last back-up was) task of getting as much stuff as possible off the drive via a cradle or enclosure.
I've had a bad run on drives lately; this is fourth laptop drive I had go west on me in the last year or so. All of the drives have been IBM 4200RPM TravelStars, all 20 or 40GB of around the same vintage (about three years old). Serves me right, I guess. After the second one died, I should have replaced the other two, instead of continuing to pummel 'em on a daily basis, but hey, I like to live on the edge.
And I guess waiting for stuff to come off the drive gives me time to whinge pointlessly in my blog about it :)
