The old saying goes, “There are only two types of people: those who have had hard drive crashes, and those who will.”

Well, I’m now a member of the former category.

I confess, I really like the iMac DV Special Edition I have sitting on my desk at home. I use it for everything from cutting digital video to balancing my books.

But suddenly one evening the hard drive started making this clanking noise that sounded like a tin ball bouncing around in a spray paint can. Then, a big thud was followed by eerie silence. I had just witnessed a death.

Of course my first emotion was denial. “Must have just been something weird,” I said to myself as I hit the restart button. But denial was quickly followed by anger.

“The damn thing is dead!” I exclaimed as the cats scattered from the room nearly colliding with one another as they raced for the door.

My last full back-up had been nearly three weeks earlier. That’s the problem with 13 GB drives: you can’t exactly fit everything on a Zip disk, so back-ups are more laborous. It appeared that I was in danger of losing about 4 GBs of video and photos.

Fortunately (I guess), I discovered that if I let the drive rest for 24 hours, it would fire up again and run for 3 to 5 minutes before launching back in to its ball in a paint can impression. So, over the course of the next two weeks, I extracted the rest of my work megabyte by megabyte. It was painful.

But here’s the kicker … my boss, Dale, stopped by my desk one afternoon during my ordeal and remarked that his daughter’s iMac DV SE had just had a hard drive failure. He and I had bought these Macs about the same time, in late 1999.

I’m wondering if we have a third party vendor problem here. If you’ve had a similar experience with a 13 GB iMac hard drive that’s over a year old, please drop me a line at:

derrick@oreilly.com

I’d like to hear your story.