Click of Death

Many, many moons ago, Iomega had to deal with a class-action lawsuit regarding their removeable media. A bad drive could cause "the click of death", damaging a disk so that it not only made it unreadable, but that disk could spread the problem to other drives.

Ever since, I've grown accustomed to recognize a clicking sound coming from a hard drive as a sure-fire sign of a dead drive. (If I remember correctly, the clicking sound is actually the drive head hitting [or "crashing"] into the platter, which is where the term "crash" came from.) When I was having CompUSA clean the dust out from uner my Tablet PC's screen a couple weeks ago, a man was in there with an external drive that was exhibiting the same tell-tale signs of a dead drive.

I think I might have snickered ever so slightly uner my breath while eavesdropping on that discussion, because karma came around and bit me in the ass this morning. I woke up to that familiar clicking sound coming from my office. Fearing the worst, I check everything out, and didn't seem to find any problems, until I saw a flickering light under the desk. The clicking was coming from ... my external hard drive. I tried to pull it up, but to no avail ... Vista wanted to format the drive. Unfortunately, my music, photos, and whatnot were all on that drive.

I'm sure I'll be really pissed about this in a few hours or so.