actually, I lost two HD in 6 months on two different notebooks, one (IDE) because of a battery problem on a inherited 4 years old Asus, the second (SATA) fail came out of the blue on a brand new but very cheap HP (350 €), warranty got me a new one, and I managed to recover ALL the data from both of them with a quite expensive USB/SATA/IDE external thingy (40€, worth every cent). then I bought an external 750 GB Seagate