Yesterday, I came back from a journey to Ireland, and the first thing I realized (well, apart from a new bed for our cat) was that the hard disk drive of the desktop computer here seems now totally broken. The HD did already some strange things in the past like not being recognized at all, some read failures during boot (GRUB showing "ORUB loading stage N" multiple times, and no, this is not a typo) or producing files in the file system that could not even be read or deleted by root. But most of the time, one or more simple reboots fixed almost all. Now it just displays an error message I am not fully aware of (Something like "SYSTEM BOOT FAILURE") when writing this, and I don't want to reboot since I would lose all settings of this Knoppix session.
The laptop's graphics card (I assume) is also broken, but this happend already prior to the journey to Ireland. It shows red lines during boot and some other unwanted graphical effects in the linux console and the screen turns to black when starting X or Windows. Currently, I have booted from a Knoppix DVD on the desktop and use the notebook as a router to the home WLAN since neither Knoppix nor ndiswrapper support the local USB WLAN adapter.
I am now going to purchase a new hard drive for the desktop, save some important data from the laptop thereon and then send it to Acer. Since companies have to guarantee two years of warranty on electronic products in Germany (as far as I am informed) I hope to get it repaired without having to pay for it.
