My 1TB HDD: 1 week later

Well it's a little more than a week but I ran into a problem I never thought I'd see:

What in the world? I run the regenerating overnight as well, so I have no idea when this happened, but waking up in the morning and seeing the drive powered off was a nightmare. Running the rescan again I found out what led to it:

Look at the "X", it's not even listed in the legend. What happened was when the program encountered a bad sector in the 2nd block, it proceeded to regenerate it, but then it encountered several more bad sectors, but instead of regenerating them, the bad sector count rapidly rose, to the point where the entire drive was listed as bad above.

I am absolutely frustrated over the lack of documentation regarding this problem, I know for a fact the entire drive is not damaged, HDD Sentinel lists it as 89% healthy with only 19 weak sectors, and I am able to still read files, albeit at only an average of 500KB/s. It took me more than 4 hours to copy 8GB of data, but the data was still intact. This leads me to think that it really is a hardware fault that not even the most powerful regenerating program can fix. What else can the program do if Western Digital is making it hard for it?

And I'm pissed, worried and totally low on moral. This changes things. I thought, like anyone else would, that with bad sectors, the logical solution is to regenerate them. But if there is a problem with the drive head, magnet, whatever is inside a hard drive, one cannot regen the sectors. I think that is my problem, and with this new development, I can't regenerate at all. It's now a race against time to save whatever files I can before the drive really dies, and that's what I don't have: time. Well, there's money too, but now I'm against time, my last chance is to RAW copy the drive into another drive, but that of course requires me to buy a new HDD, which I cannot at the moment.

The drive is getting slower ever since the problem began (the higher the seek time the slower it is to read files)

And that's the part I'm frustrated about, online the general diagnosis is buy a new HDD. I'm a little sick of that these days, it sounds easy but not under circumstances like this. How was I supposed to know the Backup drive, the Plan B of all hard drive plans, would die? There is no Plan C for things like this. And what's worse, I originally thought of filing a request for a company replacement, but when it goes for review, I have no idea how much time that would take. I don't even think I can prove the drive died in the line of duty, my HDD problem earlier in the year led me to backup important documents into several drives, so that's going to be difficult.

As such, that donation link goes back up (in the links at the top of the blog). To get an idea of how much that drive means to me, I'm even considering selling my only phone. I honestly don't know how much I can get out of it because it's a Windows Mobile phone, and while it is 1Ghz, that's just about the only thing of value I have (in excellent condition) that I can part with on short notice. (It's the phone I was working on porting Android to it for XDA) Of course, I won't be able to receive calls anymore, or browse the net when mobile, but meh, tough times. You know that DS Lite Joystick mod I did? I sold that last year (without the mod of course). That was to buy a new power adapter for my Vaio after my repair job burned out.

Funny how a few months ago I was gearing up to get a new laptop. Several months later, I changed my focus on my health, and while I am maintaining a decent health (regarding my non-permanent health issues), that comes at a cost of my equipment's condition. I don't have a well paying job, to be honest. What's more, due to the nature of my work, much of it is either behind-the-scenes or kept off the record, so much of my contributions are largely kept unknown to parties involved. The question was asked before, why not change careers, but what am I to do when that's what I'm good at, contributing without a soul knowing I did. I guess a part of that comes from how I was raised: living day to day, never splurging but never giving half the effort, either.

And that's probably how my life will continue to be if I don't think of change. Not touching photoshop in nearly two weeks is leaving a bad taste in my mouth, and if I ultimately have to sell my phone, I have to fix Android before then or my work is a bust. Or well, if some of it wasn't in the HDD in question... and before all this, I renewed my internet for another 30 days, what happens after that, who knows. (it ends 15th Oct)

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Well, if donations aren't so hot, buying through my Play-Asia banners (on the left) aren't a bad idea either, if your into gaming and such.