I try to toss out a warning about this kind of thing a couple times a year, because even when people understand that ALL hard drives are in the process of dieing the minute they are "born" (pretty much like humans), they still tend to put off doing backups.
Nearly all hard drives built in the last decade support a set of monitoring and reporting standards called "SMART". Tools to read this data are included in virtually all Linux/Unix distributions as well as Macs. On Windows, you have to install a reader utility yourself. Here's a list of the available products.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_S.M.A.R.T._tools Personally, I use the command line version of SmartMonTools on my Windows machines because it's the same thing as the one I use on my Linux servers. Those of you who are less geeky will probably want to use something with a GUI.
There are a lot of information fields available and many of them are unique to particular drive manufacturers. A couple of universal fields that are good indicators of a failure happening sooner rather than later are "Reallocated Sectors Count" (should be zero. 2 or 3 still isn't too bad. a rapid increase indicates imminent failure) and "Offline Uncorrectable" (should be zero. Anything above zero indicates instability and possible failure soon)
"Power-On Hours" is an indicator of age (the number of hours the drive has been powered up), but doesn't necessarily mean imminent failure until it's very high. On my servers, I tend to expect a failure soon when drives reaches about 26,000 hours (roughly 3 years) because they have been used hard 24/7. On a home computer that is shut down frequently, it might take a decade to reach this number. I do have a DNS machine with an old 20 gig drive that has 80,000 hours on it. In theory, it should have died years ago, but it's still hanging in there.
If you are not able or willing to deal with installing a reader, the easiest route is to assume the worst case scenario (failure in the next 5 minutes) and start backing up your important stuff immediately. USB hard drives and thumb drives are ridiculously cheap these days. For a little extra, you can pick up a network-attached storage device (NAS) that is essentially a small server-on-a-chip with an attached drive. These can be put anywhere and some even do WIFI. House fires, floods, and burglaries are a sad fact of life, so storing backup devices in a different building (garage, friends house, etc) is always a good idea. Thumb drives and laptop-sized external hard drives (2.5") easily fit into a safety deposit box.
--- TheWAMstore --- A WAM Video Supermarket - 26,000 Titles
For those of you who have nice collections, do yourself a favor and back it up.
I am definately going to try those recovery options that people have been telling me about. Hope this works, and if not, well, I should have backed it up : / Lesson learned.
