Death of Hardware (home)
One of the servers I've got at home is my designated backup server. It used to be full of 40gb IBM deathstar drives, but over time was migrated to 80gb drives (after 7 (of the 3 originally purchased) deathstars failed.) One 40gb drive was left in the box after drive #7 failed, and I fully expected that it would fail soon.
Sometime last week, the warranty on this drive expired (I think; it was already a replacement drive, so it should have fallen out of warranty at the same time as the warranty of drive#7 would have expired, modulo failure.)
Early last friday morning, the network died. Thinking that downbelow had gone south for the winter, I went downstairs to reboot it. Well, downbelow was happy, but the netgear switch was acting like a lightning storm and the console of the backup server had 3 complaints about disk resets on the 40gb drive. Rebooting the machine fixed the problem, and everything was happy, until...
Early saturday morning, the same thing happened. Same messages, same reboot, same solution, until...
Early monday morning, and then...
Tuesday afternoon, and then...
Wednesday evening (twice)
And then I turned the computer off, and decided that I could live without backups until I got the chance to put a new drive into the box. Unfortunately, the only other 40gb drives I own are deathstars, so this is only a short-term solution until I get some money and buy a drive that has a lower suckiness number.