THis is a long email describing my computer meltdown and a warning to everyone about hard drives.
I recently lost 3 hard drives in 9 days. First I lost my backup drives for both my Dell XP system and my intel MacBook. THe XP drive was a 2 1/2 month old Seagate internal drive which was used to back up my primary drive every day. THe Macbook was backed up daily, weekly and bi-weekly to separate partitions on a 7 month old 750 GB Maxtor external drive using Super Duper. I thought I was completely covered. HA. After these drives died, I was getting warnings about my primary XP drive so I immediately bought a replacement drive and another external drive for XP backup. I used Seagate's Safety Drill to clone the original 160GB primary drive onto a new WD 500GB internal which I used to replace the 160GB. I thought I would get extra space on my new larger C drive but instead I had to partition it to give me another drive to use the rest of the 500GB. So now Seagate has replaced the 500GB drive which went bad. I want to have two 500 GB drives instead of a C drive with just 160GB, a D drive with about 316GB and the new drive with 500GB. Any suggestions of how to do it? Oh yeh, I didn't worry about the MAcbook which had a 7 month old hard drive (replaced by the Apple store when the first one went bad 7 months ago). Bad decision. That one died 9 days later and not only did it have only a 3 month warranty (thank you APPLE), but I had only backed up some of my information after I had lost my big backup drive. I just didn't think lightning could strike again and again and again. Last August when I lost my first Macbook hard drive it was only 13 months old (long enough to be out of warranty) but I had a 10 day old backup and I thought that was bad. I swore this would never happen to me again. Obviously I was wrong. Yes, I think I had a power surge. And yes, I had surge protectors and even a UPS on this system. THe computers and hard drives were all on the UPS and a new printer and router, speakers, etc. were on a surge protecter. But I had just bought a new Samsung laser monochrome printer which I had installed before the internal XP drive went bad. WHen I first used the printer (plugged into the surge protecter, not the UPS), the UPS beeped at me and my XP immediately restarted. I had never seen this happen before and didn't connect it with the printing. AFter the second occurrence, I unplugged the printer and moved it to another electrical circuit. Too late. THat might explain the internal XP death, and maybe the external 750GB except it is possible that the MacBook backups were failing for a few days already before this happened. I don't understand the MacBook hard drive failure because that never restarted at all, but it was the same 80GB drive that hundreds of others are complaining about on the Apple Support discussion sites . Data recovery was just too expensive and as the days go by, I guess I can live without all I have lost, but I am constantly remembering new things that I don't have (like receipts which I thought would be safe by keeping them in email folders.) So this is a warning to all - do not depend on any backup drive. THe more I researched this, the more I found that lots of them are failing, especially the big ones. ANd all the drives that failed (5 in all since last AUgust) were Seagate or Maxtor drives which are considered to be good drives. I couldn't believe at first that people were suggesting redundancy (backing up backup drives) but I do that now. I even have online backup going as well. I also bought new surge protecters with data recovery warranties so incase this ever happens again I can at least have some hope for recovery. I hope some of you get to the end of this long message and can answer the question I asked in the third paragraph. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
