After spending a solid 10 hours trying to get this bastard drive to work I've resigned myself to losing all my stuff, and have contacted Maxtor for an RMA number so they can fix it.

I must say that while Maxtor may make crappy drives their customer service does appear to be pretty slick. Anyone that knows me knows that I don't like making phone calls or talking to people I don't know. This applies even moreso when the "person" I'm calling is a call centre where I'll no doubt have to speak to some shitty foreigner who I can't understand and who treats me like an idiot (i.e. Acer tech support who insisted that my laptop's screen not even getting powered up, along with half the rest of the laptop not getting power, was a "software problem" and I could fix it by using their "reovery" (lovely typo by them there) disks. Oh yeah, Acer?? How am I meant to run your reovery disks when my computer DOESN'T BLOODY POST??). Anyway, in my fruitless search for a phone number on the Maxtor website I was able to submit an online form requesting support, so there should be no communication issues whatsoever. They claim they will contact me in 1-2 business days. That gives them til Friday. Watch this space, as they say.

Yeah so I got home today, resumed my desktop from standby, and within 30 seconds it had frozen while trying to read a hard drive. It was at that point that I noticed a somewhat ominous clunking from the landing (where I keep the external hard drive, due to its noise when I'm trying to sleep). Immediately knew that something was up. However since then I have been unable to read or write anything to the drive and after I unplugged it Windows threw up this lovely error:

Windows - Delayed Write Failed
Windows was unable to save all the data for the file E:\$Mft. The data has been lost.

Well I've been looking to create a site such as this for some time now, and have only just got round to doing so. This is probably a good thing since now I have a design that isn't crap :D.