I'm going to be grouchy for a few days. I started up my machine this morning, and got a HDD failure report. It was my GN: drive; the SATA drive that has all the Adobe programs on it on the N partition, and Vue-VuePro, Truespace and a bunch of other stuff on the G partition (fortunately not a certain figure posing program though, not wanting to push the luck). At least it's less than a year old, so I can get it replaced.... The only good thing is that I haven't really started working on the shorts I want to do, so all I lost so far as scenes and renders were mainly tests....which hurt, but nowhere near as badly as they could. I think it be time to set up a USB archive stack of HDD's.

Once I had a hard drive that needed 4-6 tries to start correctly, also you can test another controller/cable, don't give up! An alternative to USB stack could be a Raid 1 configuration. Anyway I feel with you. Norbert

I had a similiar problem that lasted for a few months. The hard drive would be gone and come back. I started leaving the computer on all the time so as to avoid the problem otherwise 4 to 6 tries to get it going. One day I took all the hard drives out and put only the offending hard drive in with a new cable and now it works. I haven't had the problem since. I hope you are as lucky.
I also have had problems if the room was too hot or humid. I once lived nearly on top of a lake and my computer broke down more that year then ever before. I think it was from the extra moisture from the lake. Happy to have moved. Good luck again.

I haven't shot it dead just yet, but I have a bad feeling that it's a thermal failure. The drive identifies just fine...but it throws nothing but I/O errors. Went and got another SATA drive (used the opportunity to go from a 160 to a 250 gig...which will put my real estate in the 620gb range. I'll get my terabyte tower for 1,000 woody points yet!), and one of those Antec fanned HDD heat sinks that go into a full bay. If I -do- manage to resurrect the old drive I'll be a happy puppy. If not....I might use the chance to reconfigure some things... I'd be crying if I didn't enjoy digging into a computer so much...... :P

I know how you feel it happened to me a few times with inadequate backups. I hope you get it going again or can recreate it; then go online to Acronis.com and get True Image. I made a true image of my disk and stored it on my WD portable drive. Last week I got the blue screen of death on w2k and had it all restored in one hour. All I lost was a few freebies and some art I had created since my last backup increment. Disk images can be created on any size dirve providing they are large enough and even CD's or DVD's but it will take a lot of these. Incidently you get the exact HD you had before Passwords and serial #'s and software too. Goodluck

I feel with you Dale B!

I had similar problems 2 months ago. Fortunately, wise from experience, I do external backup every hour so I didn't loose much work. But it took a week for me to have everything back in the right spot and running again. It felt as if I have billions of files nested everywhere on the 2 disks. Sigh... I am no expert.
Anyhow, I made an image of the whole thing so hopefully next time will be faster.