When I first turned it on, it reported a hard disk failure.
While I've experienced a hard disk failure, they have been few and far between.
I immediately went online, bought a copy, downloaded it, and then sat in wait for my first hard disk failure.
The phenomenon of disk failure is not limited to hard drives.
In order to avoid the loss of data due to disk failure, common solutions include:
Note that often these files are stored multiple times, for extra security in case of disk failure.
After one (or a number) of disk failures, getting the system into a clean state can take a long time.
There are many things that can happen to this file system other than physical disk failure.
What we've found is an alarming number of disk failures at the second the gas was released.
Hard disk failures fall into one of two basic classes: