I got this hard drive back in January 2000, it failed sometime after that and I RMA'd it. Then later it squeeked once or twice and got bad sectors. Those sectors stayed bad for about 2 years, then I took hddregen to it and got those back to life. Also somewhere in there I did that firmware patch.

I come into work last week, and hear some not friendly sounds. Here is what happened:

Yep, it completely scratched the metal surface on the platters off.

I always have backups of my important stuff. Unfortunately for me, I lost a few files I had recently worked on at work. Fortunately for me though, most of those that I didn't have saved, I had emailed to people, and they were in my sent items folder on the Exchange Server.

Everything else though that was on that that had any value, I have a copy on my comp at home, and on cd, and on my account work gives me on their servers.