Your hard drive is toast. I've lost a few like that as well. After you go buy a new one, I recommend you buy a second at the same time. Then buy a ghosting program to ghost your whole harddrive ontot the second. I use Acronis True Image. Its about $50. I've also heard Norton Ghost is good, but I went with Acronis after reading some reviews that compared the two. My setup is to have the second drive for nothing but archive. True Image will protect the space so nothing else can go there. Then depending on how often you want it backed up, you can let it do incremental backups that don't take much time at all.

It seems to me Hard drives are failing a lot more often than they used to. At least that's been my experience. I wonder why. Cheaper parts? Higher heat? More use?

-Steve G.