On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 17:41 -0500, bobgoodwin wrote: > The problem arose from the fact that I suspected an intermittent drive > problem. Apparently the failure was on the Windows drive while I was > only using FC4 and MySql! I ran smartctl and it indicated that both > drives had a lot of use on them. One looked like more than four years > power on time! I assumed it was the bad drive and replaced it with > another low time drive I had and then I began to have trouble. The > computer would not boot no matter what I tried. Don't worry, too much, about drive having a lot of run time. Some have very long lives. And having said that, some very new drives can fail very quickly. It's not without reason some manufacturers reduced their warranty periods (they *expect* those ones to fail sooner, and don't want to replace drives). There are other things which assess the quality of the drive operation, and I'd pay more attention to them. I'd be considering the run-life of a drive depending on how much more time I hoped to get out of the drive, rather than presuming it's not going to be very good. -- Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.