The only hard drive that I own and died on me, died after at least ten years of use, heck, the computer wasn't even a pentium!.

But I did had a painful experience with a friends hdd.

Turns out we spent over 6 months doing a team assignment on programming our own personal agenda for a pocket pc. Everything from requeriments, to design, codification, testing and documentation.

We were 6 persons.

Judgment came and we had to hand over our project on cd. It was due to 9am. At 8am everything was ready. We only needed to burn and... voila!!! The hdd of the laptop of the team leader crashed, died and never came back to life!

We were like... oh shit... now what? Fortunately we DID had a perfect copy at another laptop... whose owner did not arrive... The guy did not arrive... so we thought of phoning him... and we got the message on the phone "this number is out of service due to lack of payment".

We were so screwed (later we found this guy had overslept....)

We went and told our sad tale to the professor and he gaves us 1 more hour, to see what we could do.

As the guy with the only other perfect copy was not a viable solution, we searched our other laptops and found a copy that was at about 80% of completion.

Resigning ourselves, we handed that copy. Worst was nothing.

Fortunately the professor still graded us with 80 points out of 100.

But heck, I believe I got a few years older that time.

PS:
Good luck with your assignment complich8.
Hope you finish in time.