Trouble in digital land

Last night, as I was cleaning up one of my hard drives, it started going kablooy — that is the technical term; for the lay persons in my readership, that means the directories started showing only one or two letters of the filenames.
I knew something was wrong: I called it a night, but first, I shut down my CPU and started Spinrite, (which I purchased legally from GRC), and went to bed. It ran for seven hours and told me there was nothing wrong with my main drive. Tonight, I shall have to run it on my secondary drive. What Spinrite does is diagnose the drive and if possible, fix what is wrong with it, one bit at a time.

There is always tension underlying our use of computers: we don't really understand what is going on; as a result, knowing it can all come crashing down makes papyrus storage at the great library in Alexandria seem very attractive.