Local news: Regarding our hard drive failure

As we reported yesterday, one of the two hard drives installed in our Power Mac G4 died. It was the one that contained our OS X startup partition. Not fun!. FWIW, the drive that went bad was a new 60GB drive, still under warranty, not the original drive that shipped with the G4. The original drive is still chugging along.

The good news: Almost all critical files had been backed up and we are up-and-running again.

The bad news: The single biggest loss was our Entourage email database. Our most recent backup copy was about a month old. So, we have lost (at least for now) about 100 or so recent emails that we were looking at for possible postings on this page. We have sent the drive to DriveSavers for possible recovery, but it will be at least a week before we find out what they are able to do.

Lessons learned: The drive exhibited an occasional strange noise for a day or two before it failed. We were instantly on guard. Unfortunately, we mistakenly (never mind how) thought that the drive that was making the noise was in fact the one that turned out to be fine. So we were extra careful to backup most recent items on the good drive to the imploding drive, which of course turned out to be of no help. We shoulda backed up everything (as we have advised others countless of times).

Update: Several readers have queried about the drive and its symptoms. It was a Western Digital Caviar 5400 ATA drive. Western Digital support was excellent. A replacement drive arrived today at no cost (the drive was still under warranty; but we did have to pay for the overnight shipping). The symptom was a repetitive clicking as the Mac first tried to access the drive. WD support said that the head was trying to read the startup block and could not do so, so it kept retrying.