If you have an IBM hard drive, think seriously about replacing it soon. If you
are
thinking of getting a new one, please do a Google search for "IBM Deathstar"
first.

Things have been going slower than usual for me because of my experience with
the IBM Deskstar hard drive I bought in October. It showed the first signs that
something wasn't quite right when it was only a few weeks old. (At that time, I
thought the problems were due to Win 2K.)  It became "confused" in December
and again in February, taking a couple of weeks to rebuild each time. The
company
I bought the computer from replaced the memory, thinking that it was faulty and
causing write errors when heavily loaded. The disk died completely in July, this

time requiring a complete reformat and reinstall of everything. Sadly, it died a

few more times while we were trying to reinstall the OS. Eddie, the technician,
said, "That's really bad" when the second black screen came up. "We'll take it
back to the shop and see what we can do there," he said. In the end, I bought a
Western Digital and sent the IBM drive back to IBM. (No response from them
yet, over a month later.) I wasn't able to recover some files, including several

messages, so if I you wrote to me and I haven't answered, please write again.

A backup of a corrupted hard drive, I learned, is likely to be corrupt.

I'm still installing software and looking for files on CDs that I made before
the
IBM died.

Here are a couple of links for more about the problems:

    http://www.tech-report.com/news_reply.x/3494/

    http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dType=article&dId=180

--
Bill Richards