I learned something today:

$ fortune -m LikeThis    
(knghtbrd)
%
<Overfiend> Thunder-: when you get { MessagesLikeThisFromYourHardDrive }
<Overfiend> Thunder-: it either means { TheDriverIsScrewy }
<Overfiend> or
<Overfiend> { YourDriveIsFlakingOut BackUpYourDataBeforeIt’sTooLate
            PrayToGod }
%

I’m posting from that a Knoppix 3.3 LiveCD on that old ThinkPad 600 I saved from the trash bin. Spent yesterday struggling to get the wireless card – a Netgear MA521 – to get an IP address from the DHCP server. Using Ndiswrapper with the driver they suggest worked great for detecting the card and to get signal and the correct network (according to Kwifimanager), but it just would not acquire the IP for some reason.

On the heels of that, this morning I started getting errors like this one:

end_request: I/O error, dev 03:05 (hda), sector 4432611
hda: read_intr: status=0x5b { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Index Error }
hda: read_intr: error=0×40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=4956834, sector=4432611

What I’ve gathered from newsgroup posts and reiserfsck output is that the hard drive is on its way out, just as the fortune says. I’m running badblocks as suggested by the “Bad block handling in ReiserFS” article in a last-ditch attempt to salvage the drive for a little while longer, but the list of bad blocks is enormous, so I’m fairly certain it’s shot. Bummer. Maybe I can still get it sold on eBay for $200…

On a side note, nothing but nothing is more annoying to me than accidently clicking a button or hitting some keyboard shortcut in the middle of typing a long post and then hitting back only to find that my entire text has been erased because it expired from the cache. Brilliant. I mean, could they not provide some sort of contingency for that, save form data little while longer? Cripes, it’s a royal pain in my butt.