You won't find scorch marks on the contacts. If you rub them with plain white printer paper, you will see the layer of greenish oxidation that builds up over time. Taking them out and reinserting them probably cleaned them off a bit, but if the machine starts acting up again, clean the contacts with the paper by folding it over both sides, squeezing, and sliding the card back and forth. It's just abrasive enough to clean them pretty good without leaving metal filings all over the place.

You're right. It was the Renaissance (in which the printing press played a big part, I suppose) that copyright is trying to push back :-) Heh, seems to be working, slowly, but surely.

Nice link by the way, too bad to see it's behind a pay wall. Almost ironic, considering the manner in which it treats the subject

If I have it right, "truecrypting" the entire disk just makes the bios ( or any disk utility for that matter, so something like cfdisk won't help) see only one big partition, as opposed to the four it is expecting. This vaguely reminds me of that old disk compression system used by Microsoft way back in the early 90s (Stacker?) where the entire system was basically just one big file on the disk. If any part of it became corrupted, the entire thing was toast. Sounds like the solution you found is the only one available. I'll be watching for a follow up. Don't disappoint us :-)

Gutenberg? Isn't he the guy who made that infernal contraption that is responsible for for the imposition of copyright on the world in the first place?

So why blame us for the stupidity of the Government?

I don't exactly know how to explain it, but there is a process in many countries that operate with the consent of the governed for deciding who runs the government. The word escapes me at the moment

Slshdot "partners" aren't known for in-depth anything, except advertising. I got modded down for pointing that out. But I got first post :-) See groklaw for actual analysis. The AC's response graciously provided the link. Very good writeup.

Thank you.. That's a thousand time more informative that the submission.

the company formerly known as Sun...

...should be unpronounceable in mixed company

Where's Groklaw in all of this?

Well whaddya know... It is a small world after all.

Even if memtest says it's ok. Take out the sticks, and clean the contacts. Believe it, or not, I've had more than one disk error and other weird stuff caused by bad/dirty RAM. Windows chkdsk was erasing files and then "recovering" them like mad. Almost lost the entire partition. In fact, make sure all your cards have clean contacts. It has cleared up many strange install problems, so it's kind of hard to overstate it.

If you've had thermal warnings on the CPU, then, yes, take the heatsink off, and clean it and the CPU (leave it in place, no need to remove it) with acetone, or fingernail polish remover (same thing?), and then put just a dab of new paste. The silvery stuff is the best, so they say.. the cheap white silicon one is adequate, but the former will last many years.. actually, the cheap stuff will probably last just as long.

I use partimage for disk/partition cloning. For ntfs, use ntfsclone... both are very reliable. SystemrescueCD is my favorite live CD/USB bootup tool

Que los trolls partidista normales gritando acerca de cómo el gobierno debe "mantener sus manos alejado del mercado libre ". Acuerdate ustedes, antes de responder, asegurarse de olvidar convenientemente que el estado actual de cosas es cualquier cosa menos un mercado libre, y que las compañías telefónicas han sido los portadores comunes durante años sin que los fundamentos de la libertad se construyó este país, supuestamente, en ruinas. (bueno, al menos no por eso)
*que que QUE?!*