I knew this would happen eventually, but I figured that with a less than 2-month-old hard drive, it would be a while.
Last night my 120 gig LaCie external firewire HD died. Its icon shows, but my system (XP) reports that it is empty and unformatted.
It had 80 gigs of music on it.
The good news is that my old Maxtor 40 gig drive still has the 40 gigs on it that I transferred to the LaCie when I got it. It really belongs to my stepdaughter, and I just hadn't got around to reformatting it and giving it back. (And LaCie will replace the new drive; gee, thanks.)
The bad news of course is the other 40 gigs that I've lost, stuff I ripped/downloaded since the end of December. And I had RG'd about 85 percent of my files. And done hours and hours of other housekeeping chores.
I'm considering trying a data recovery service, but they are horrendously expensive.
It's a good thing storage has become "cheap" because I see no other remedy but to have twin drives, and keep one as a mirror/backup. Of course, at 120 gigs each, two drives will set me back $400-$500, no longer "cheap."
Thanks for letting me vent; this reads like I'm pretty calm. You should've heard/seen me at 2:30 this morning. Cat's still shaking.
So am I, actually.