The Facts Were These....

On Thursday night/Friday morning, I used Windows Update on my system to apply about 16 updates to Windows Vista and to Microsoft Office.

Instead of postponing the restart process for a couple of days — until it's convenient — like I usually do, I restarted the system about ten minutes after the updates were finished.

The system would not come back up.

The following night, I attempted to use both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista install DVD to restore the Windows installation. Both of these methods agreed on one thing: there was no damaged Windows installation on the hard drive to repair. Au contraire, Vista. Au contraire.

The next-bigger gun to come out was Ubuntu-8.10-desktop-amd64, which contains, among other things, gparted. gparted showed me the severity of my situation. Not only did I not have a Windows install on the disk, I lacked any partition information whatsoever. Without opening up a hex editor to confirm my suspicions, the observed symptoms of my situation were similar to the ones I would have if I'd run dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda and let it run for at least a couple of seconds.

The next-bigger gun still: SpinRite, the "Should I trust it or shouldn't I?" data recovery application. It's presently doing a bit-level diagnostic of my disk looking for survivors. We shall see what it discovers in time.

The next step after this is to put Windows on an extra hard drive and try to throw an NTFS-specific recovery app at the busted drive.

The moral of the story? Back up your data. The bigger moral of the story? Back up all of your data, not just the really most sincerely important bytes. A potentially bigger moral? Don't buy a Western Digital Velociraptor, but that moral is contingent on the hardware being at fault, which isn't a proven fact at this point.

Update: Yup, it's a bad drive.

Update 2: Running Western Digital's "Data Lifeguard Diagnostics". It immediately experienced a "read event failure". I've filed an RMA and I'm wondering if or how I can get my money back.

Update 3: Data Lifeguard Diagnostics self-terminated with a "too many errors, please call technical support" message. Fun!