Yesterday, I had a hard drive die on me 😦. It was a 160 GB Seagate Barracuda, and was less than a year old. It started with strange error messages late last night. I went to the server, reset it (need to power it off - It wouldn't shutdown cleanly), and now it won't boot. When I try to boot the system, I can hear the drive head hitting against the side of the drive, which makes me think there is a problem internally with the drive...
I'm looking into recovery options, though I think it will be way too expensive for my needs. If it is too expensive, I'll just have to cut my losses and move on. A lot of my development work was on this server (it was my backup PC as well). Whilst I have local copies of stuff, a lot of it is slightly old. It's kinda depressing to have something like this happen, so I'm not really in a good mood at the moment 😦
Update: About two weeks after the hard drive "failed", I tried it again. It was working, but made a strange sound. I quickly copied all the data off of it, and disconnected it. I was able to get a copy of all the most important data. So, it's not so bad... This story has a happy ending 😄