Hard Drive Crash, Installed New SCSI Hard Drive. Well… The past week hasn’t been that fun due to having my hard drive crash, die, etc. It started when I turned on my computer, went upstairs to make myself some coffee, came back down to see a ‘black screen’. Not good I thought. I then shut off my computer, turned it back ON and this time watched… Invalid System Disk it said. I kept turning it off, then on, and watching… nothing different. Oh man. I also noticed the hard drive would make a click sound, or ticking sound, and then the 2nd click sound was the drive turning off. My Adaptec 29160 scsi host adapter said unable to start drive. No good. I then used my music recording computer to go onto the internet to research my issue. Everywhere I read they said it’s a BAD HARD DRIVE when you hear that clicking/ticking sound when it first turns on. End result… I had to buy a new hard drive. I bought the Seagate ST3146855LW U320 146gb SCSI hard drive for $260. Pretty much the worst thing that could happen to me being out of a job, no money, and living on the internet. After installing the new hard drive I noticed right away my computer was running extremely slow… going into Windows XP, opening programs, etc. I then ran some benchmark programs to find out ‘what’ was running slow in my computer. Turns out it was my new hard drive running at 2.7mb/s rather than 80mb/s as it should. Replacing the Adaptec U160 LVD/SE SCSI cable fixed this problem and man the hard drive ran fast after installing the new cable. I noticed right away it going into Windows XP fast and loading all the programs by the Windows XP clock fast too… hearing the hard drive munch all the information super fast… very cool. Then I started installing all the Windows XP updates… which took a solid days time to get ALL the updates for my Windows XP fresh install. Then I started installing all my software (Sound, Video card drivers, Outlook, Word, Excel, graphics, mp3, spyware programs, etc.). Then I had to login to places where I uploaded photos and download the photos to my computer, as well as stick cds of my music in my computer to restore all the music I lost from my old hard drive crashing. Lots of annoying work there. Having my old hard drive crash… I lost all the original artwork for my music cds… I have 1000×1000 pixel jpg images of my cds… so I can at least use those for making new cds… but the original design is gone so I can’t make high resolution images of those anymore. I lost all the original cavalier puppy, lily pad, my brother John and me images… so I can’t make anything ‘new’ with those images because I lost the originals. Bummer. The lesson here people is BACKUP YOUR HARD DRIVE! because I learned that NEW / NEWER hard drives don’t last as long as the OLD ones use to because NEW hard drives are made to go FASTER… faster = more heat = less life on your hard drive. So backup ONLY the information you never want to lose (pictures, music, etc.). You don’t have to backup everything on your hard drive… but at least the pictures, music, word and excel documents, etc. that you don’t want to lose forever.
