Well, an eventful number of days. We can now add filter coffee machine and laptop hard disk to the melting pot of technology that has failed in the last two weeks.

It does ram home the importance of good strong backups – which I had. To this extent, I had no worries straight off attempting to recover the disk using all the tools at my disposal without a single attempt to copy a file off it. To be honest, that would have been a bad idea as this failure was indicated by interesting CRC errors when trying to copy seemingly good files off to the network storage – the files were likely completely screwed anyway. So now I have slipped a spare 60GB disk into the laptop and proceeding to getting back up and working with the added advantage of not having 2 years of rubbish there. I only have the manufacturers crap to get rid of now.

I will still persevere with that disk a little while longer until I am sure that it is more than a simple few sectors gone bad that should be recoverable from. Then I am likely to find myself another 250GB disk so that I may acquire a portable unit to which I can back up my main laptop without worrying about running out of space.

Now I am on the lookout for portable disk management ideas….