I see you are adding a nice covering disclaimer to cover yourself against JT remarks there Submeg!

Worst HD failure I had was on my A1200 and I've mentioned it before on the old forums. I switched the A1200 on one morning and the HD just made a horrible clunking noise that sounded like the read/write head was tapping against the disk surface.

It was my main system at the time and was running a 1.2GB 3.5" HD inside the A1200. I was using the system for all of my University coursework and was one week away from the completion date for a big animation project we were doing. I was using Take2 for the animation on the Amiga and had captured in all the hand drawn frames, cleaned them up, inked them and started to colour them all, when the HD failed

The HD was still under warranty so I rang the company up and they said that I could either post the drive to them, and they would test it and then let me know, or I could take the HD to their shop in Croydon (London) and they would be able to look at it the same day. So as I really needed the HD to be able to complete my work I spent the day driving up to Croydon, parting in a horrible multi-story car park, and then walking round for a long time trying to find this store.

The manager in the store tested the drive and this showed it was dead, then he first said the drive would need to be posted back to the manufacturer for testing/repair and I would need to wait for it to be posted back. The engineer in store told me to wait a minute, and when the manager was out of the shop he gave me a new 1.3GB HD instead. Then about a month later another new 1.3GB HD arrives in the post direct from the manufacturer. So it all ended up very nicely with one HD for my A1200 and another for the A4000 I had just acquired.

I do have one other major HD data lose, but this wasn't an HD failure. It was on an Archon external A600/A1200 HD that plugs into the PCMCIA slot. The software to run the drive was actually stored on the PCMCIA card that was connected between the drive and the system and you could access the contents of the card as it contained a few utilities you could use for partitioning and other HD things. There was this program ICON that was not mentioned in the manual and I was unsure what it was there to do, so I decided to double click it and see. TO my horror this icon was an instant factory reset program. As soon as I launched the program a box came up saying "your drive is now setup and ready to use". I had been using the drive for a month or so and had a lot of stuff on there and a nice setup. All was gone and the drive was freshly formatted with nothing on it at all! That was a big shock. Quite mad that the program didn't even show a warning, it just ran and wiped the drive.