It always baffles me why people expect it to make me feel better to hear that other people are having a bad time as well! Sympathy :-/

It gives them an excuse to vent, mostly, I think :-). Also I suppose it points to the problem being that of the technology rather than the person using it. Likewise ...

I was already fairly convinced the problem here was with the technology; the disk is spontaneously acquiring more and more bad sectors even as I watch, fsck refuses to even run now because there's a bum sector in the middle of the block bitmap (which is one of the few bits that can't be worked around by marking it as unusable in the badblocks inode) but it had previously worked fine, and so on. The only thing I can really imagine that I could have done but didn't was to run the Maxtor downloadable diagnostic over the disk before putting any data on it, and I'm now fairly convinced that it would have worked fine at the time if I'd done so.

... indeed, you seem to be right: I'm venting. Odd that. :-S

If it makes you feel any better, I managed to rip my whole CD collection onto the hard drive of one of my computers, and then copied it across to the other computer I have on my home network. About a month later the first hard disk failed, but fortunately I had a backup.

Hmm, I imagine that doesn't work either. I'm sorry you lost all your mp3 ripping work. Still, it does look like a good excuse to buy a DVD writer for backup purposes...

We'll just point and laugh at you instead, then.

Hugs.