They come in threes?

I've been having various problems with my computers lately, but I hope that if they come in threes I've now got through all of them. :-)

First it started with my laptop crashing out on me, and then lots of input/output errors - in theory it was booting, but then it refused to do anything useful. Running a SMART test from a LiveCD pointed to a hard drive failure, and I had to work out how to take my laptop apart and replace the drive. (The fact that it was broken anyway was a considerable comfort... I figured I couldn't actually make it worse.) In fact, it was quite easy, and new drive installed I repartitioned and reinstalled the software - something I've got quite practised at with all the playing about with different distros that I do.

At this point, I thought perhaps it would be a good idea to run a test on my desktop drive, just in case, and was rather concerned to see that it was showing a FAIL as well. (A sign that it could go at any time, though it was still working fine at that point.) I made sure my backups were up to date, and hoped to discuss a suitable new drive with alitalf, as I was visiting him and Hibernia for the Innmoot weekend.

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