Hard Drive Crashed and Burned Tuesday Testing GitHub as Blogging Platform

My powerbook's hard drive died on Tuesday. I came home to find my screen saver frozen and could not get remote access via ssh. I had a number of crashes in the last week which I think was a sign that things were going south - especially since my powerbook (G4 800) is normally stable. When I reboot the machine appeared to hang. I rebooted again and this time I pressed [cmd]-v before it started to boot. This took me to verbose/console mode and I was able to watch the system messages. I noticed a lot of disk I/O errors.

( Click to read about the 4 day nightmare that followed. )

The short of it is the old hard drive broke down - probably a broken write head.? (It definitely had an interesting rattle to it..) I got a newer bigger and faster HD out of it at the cost of an OS reinstall and restore (4 evenings of my life, I'll never get back..). I have a skeleton system running Panther with just the essentials restored - Mail, firefox, iLife, etc. When Tiger comes I'll get everything restored.

Do you suppose this is fate preventing me from becoming a WOW addict like the Van Ee clan?