I managed to send through a few IM's and posts this morning via my wife's laptop and modem (like this one), but I'll be in and out most of the day... My hard drive crapped out on the main router box (my Linux box), so I've been forced to rebuild on a blank from backup. Fortunately, everything is backed-up, and I'm in the middle of turning it into a dual-boot Win2k/Caldera 3.1 box. Ergo, I'll be popping in and out on the web to grab patches. (PS: Quantum Fireball hard drives suck - this one was barely 6 months old when it died.) /P

My condolences. I've only had one hard drive crap out on me in all the years since I started playing with these machines (a Conner, if anyone's curious), but I understand that it can be a traumatic experience.

Don't feel too bad I lost a SCSI Cheetah last week too.

Got 'er most of the way back up... (I got bored whilst waiting for Windoze setup, so I fired up the missus' laptop... mine doesn't have any modem software isntalled, and I didn't want it patched to the wireless transciever.) This is the first post from the Windoze half of the repair... as soon as I get some files moved around and cleaned up, it'll be time to reboot and install the Linux half. Fortunately, I only had to pop in a few CD's and unzip the lot of 'em :) ...only problem is, it takes forever to unzip 'em in Windows. BTW - I wound up with the Fireball in a Maxtor box... seems Maxtor bought Quantum up, and had been selling a lot of Quantum's stock in Maxtor boxes. I thought nothing of it because Maxtor also included a message saying that they'll back up the Fireball w/ the same warranty, etc... Now, I'm not so sure. The new drive is a Seagate :/ /P

That sounds familiar. Conner was assimilated by Seagate after I bought the drive. When it went belly-up after ten months of use, Seagate supported the warranty and replaced the drive, although it took them three months to get back to me. I didn't feel like complaining, though. The replacement drive was half-again larger than the original.

Ohhhh I feel the pain. Oh poop! I have some Quantums. One is in use, two are on the shelf waiting for use. Ahhhhh! The Maxtors I've used all die in less than a year but Western Digitals all keep running years after the install. Odd huh? I just had my FIC AZ11 Mobo die last week forcing me to make my AMD 1.4Giger Poser ready so I can get back to using it. Ever try to set up swapable drives with Win2000? It became Win666. Registry? What registry? The horror! That made it two machines down in one week end. Ahhhhhh! I realy feeeeel the pain, yours and mine.

Funny, I'm using a Maxtor that's about four years old... it's my Poser drive, and is considerably more reliable than my main drive, which is a Fujitsu...

Good to hear. Maybe Maxtor just doesn't like me. Hehehe. My Linux runs on a Fujitsu. I put a fan over it cus it runs as hot as a fire cracker. :)

Fujitsu hard drives sux. We have 24 new machines with them on 2 sites and till now was 8 hard drives failed and had to replaced in 1 year. I use IBM hard drives and have no problems with them. Seravajan