It has been damage control central for the computers here lately. I've probably put in thirty hours in the last week and a half trying to get things to where my home systems are stable. What fun…
It all started when my wife's Windows box ate its disk. To be more exact, disks, actually. There was a funny little 6GB boot drive that had never worked very well, driving a 60GB Windows drive. Unfortunately, they were both trashed beyond recovery.
So I brought the box back up as a Linux box, and went to try to back it up. I'd actually been struggling with my USB backup system for a while; it kept eating my filesystems. This time, it showed hopeless.
The biggest trouble system was that it would lock up the backup box hard. Really hard, like a PCI bus lockup or something.