schroedinger's hard disk: my external HDD was dead and alive!

Yesterday, I'd brought my external drive to the office so my colleague can copy some files of mine. Little did I know that when I'd disconnected it from my PC at home, the electrical connection had gone a bit wonky. Plugging it into the machine at work, we realised it didn't work. Borrowing 2 USB cables from my department didn't work either.

Worried, I brought the device home. Alas, it was to no avail. Short on time, we'd return to office sans hard drive.

Returning home vexed the whole day from work + the impending decision to make another purchase for a new HDD, I gave it one more shot. Taking the drive out from the casing, I placed it in another machine. It worked!

So now, my next step would probably be to get another casing for this drive of mine. It was more of the data I had inside that made me upset. All 80GB of it. I'm not sure if I'd even want to buy the newer drives that can go up to 1TB! Imagine the pain if all the data in one of that is gone!