In almost twenty years I have never experienced a hard disk failure. My first hard disk was a 20MB monster purchased in 1987 to go in my amber-screened 8MHz 8086-compatible. It worked until just a few years ago when I took it apart for magnets. Since then I've steadily progressed up to the 160GB SATA 7200RPM 8MB cache Hitachi Deskstar, which I bought in April 2004 for video editing.
Two mornings ago Windows XP refused to boot up, remaining at the pretty XP logo screen. When pressed, it revealed that its loading would proceed up to mup.sys, then halt. Google pointed me to a Hardware Analysis forum, which didn't offer any immediate solutions.
Given that this problem occurred overnight, it had to be a hardware fault, and the most common hardware fault when you're not fiddling with your PC's innards has got to be the forever-moving hard disk.
At this stage I started thinking about backups. I make my main backups across the network to my second PC, and vice versa. I checked the contents and viability of the backups, and found they were fine. There was just a minor amount of data that had changed since the last backup that would be useful to try to retain. This was straightforward because I had multiple OSes on multiple partitions, and the other OSes still booted.
My data was on a FAT32 partition, so I could access that from the Win98 OS, and backup that. A tiny amount of data was on an NTFS partition, which I could still reach from my Linux OS. So, I had everything I could possibly need off the disk. Time to check about the disk warranty.
Hitachi have a nice little Disk Fitness Test program, which I downloaded and ran. It informed me that my disk was defective, as it was suffering from excessive shock. Assured that I couldn't fix it, I took it back to its place of purchase, and I'm now awaiting a replacement.
Although this whole event is a slight annoyance, it does give me the opportunity to install from scratch all my OSes, which I have been meaning to do for a while. It also takes me back to 2004, because the temporary disk I am now using is my previous hard disk (a 20GB Quantum Fireball) which has not been formatted since I removed it. Windows 2000 sure seems clunky.