My hard disk drive has started making funny grinding and clicking noises and guess what? Its the one with all my photos on. 

Luckily
it was struggling along and allowed me back up all my photos. This was done pretty quickly before the disk failed completely. Everything backed up and happy now.
New 500g disk on order with ebuyer for £64 including vat
which leaves the old disk in the shade as it was only 40gb. While I was ordering the disk I thought I'd add some more memory, 1gd to be precise
.
Anyway the disk stopped making that awful noise and seems to be working OK before I pulled it out of the PC, but theres no way I'm using this disk again.
I was lucky this time and from now on I'm definitely backing up on a more regular basis from now on.
I'm just posting this so that other forum members don't fall into the same trap. Once the disk fails is almost impossible to get the data back.
Luckily
it was struggling along and allowed me back up all my photos. This was done pretty quickly before the disk failed completely. Everything backed up and happy now. New 500g disk on order with ebuyer for £64 including vat
.Anyway the disk stopped making that awful noise and seems to be working OK before I pulled it out of the PC, but theres no way I'm using this disk again.
I was lucky this time and from now on I'm definitely backing up on a more regular basis from now on.
I'm just posting this so that other forum members don't fall into the same trap. Once the disk fails is almost impossible to get the data back.