Two weeks ago the hard disk on my main Windows machine (the one I use for video editing and commercial software in general) failed to the point of becoming unbootable and I have spent most of my free time since recovering. Some random observations.

• Even if you are reasonably careful about backing up your important stuff, the disk will die when you have valuable stuff on it that is not backed up.
• Build yourself a copy of The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows now. (It will be a lot harder to build if your only Windows machine with a CD burner is dead.) This allowed me to boot up the machine and transfer my data to an external hard drive.
• Get yourself an eternal hard drive with a USB connection now. These are reasonably cheap and they are the only really easy way to back up all your important data on a regular basis.
• If you buy a new SATA hard disk it will probably be SATA II (300Mb/s). If your motherboard is more than a year old it will probably only support SATA I (150Mb/s). To get this to work right you will probably have to put a jumper on the drive to make it run at 150Mb/s, and you may have to go to the manufacturer’s web site to find out how to do this.

Symptom: The drive works fine with CDs and CD-Rs, but it won’t work with DVDs or DVD-Rs or DVD+Rs etc.

or

The drive works fine with DVDs, etc, but it won’t work with CDs.

Answer: The drive has two different lasers, one for each generation of media. One of the lasers is no longer working. If the drive is still under warrenty, get it replaced. Otherwise just buy a new one.