It never rains etc.

So, in the middle of the transfer of all my business data to the new Dell, my home computer has hardware failure.

I've been increasingly aware of issues: once I was sat in the livingroom having just started it on the windows partition, heard a 'click' and then seen it go directly from login to blue screen of death. The Linux side has been reasonably OK until this last week or 2 when it suddenly refused to print, and then I started seeing warning messages about USB failure.

My initial assumption was that openSUSE had received a bad update & was struggling a bit (actually that started a while back) but when I then found that I couldn't copy my files to another drive I became much more concerned. Various attempts with drives formatted different ways and connected through SATA, external USB etc all failed, as had using a live linux OS for copying, so I decided to do a fresh rebuild using the old machine I'd had until a couple of years back.

Used PC components apparently don't store well.

With fiddling, I could get the old machine to post OK and access the bios, but it wouldn't get as far as actually searching for a boot drive (Stopped at the DMI line in posting).

So I have a small stack of hard drives sat on my desk waiting for data recovery to archive drives, then wipe & reinstall, but that will be AFTER the hardware issues are fixed. And I'm getting too old to enjoy crawling on the floor un-plugging & replugging stuff for the 7th or 8th time. I still have 3 working laptops (Dell Boy, the Macbook and my old Philips knock-about machine) but none have the multi-terabyte HDDs inside that I want for backup purposes. I do have an HDD to UBS drive caddy and there is a D-Link NAS device upstairs, so I could use the Philips as a pass-through device to transfer data to the NAS I guess (about 1Tb of data at 10-20Mb/sec, wonder how long that would take?).

Meh, as Johanna C would say.