I just had a hard drive failure. Granted that seems to happen a lot these days, but this one was a Seagate Cheetah drive; I’ve never had one of them fail.
The problem was that the drive screeched loudly 15-20 seconds on machine start up and sporadically during use. Of course, that drive contains my WinXP partition, my Data partition, and my Media partition; I was able to save all of my data, since it hadn’t fully crashed yet. And I was also able to DBAN it before I send it back for replacement. So it wasn’t that bad of a failure.
This is one of those instances where having multiple hard drives and 1 or more operating systems on each hard drive. I was able to change the boot order in BIOS and boot to another drive (this one with Vista Ultimate), so I’m still able to work. 🙂