[clug] Drive failure

[peter]

A friend has just had a five year old, 40Gb Fujitsu hard drive fail with  
no warning.
All attempts to rescue the data on the drive were fruitless, as it would  
not even spin up.
Google found some Australian sites offering professional data recovery  
<approx.$800> and the information that the main chip on the drive  
controller was known to fail on a range of Fujitsu drives. To make matters  
worse, you cannot just swap the board for a known good one, and when the  
chip fails, it writes gibberish to the drive.
So the moral of the story is; always do your back-ups, and think about  
replacing that old drive.
Pete