Do you trust your X-drive's?

[vvizard]

I've gotten an X-drive since last christmas, but have to admit I've never used it.. I don't trust it :-P Of course I've used it to dump pictures, but I've never ever deleted those pics from my microdrive, so it've mostly been for "testing" the X-drive. It have always worked, but I still don't dare to delete pictures from the microdrive, and then actually using the X-drive for what it's meant for.. I hate having it but not using it, and sometimes I would need it.. If I only dared doing it :(

[robertwgross]

I have an old version 1 of that thing, and it works fine with the hard disk that I installed in it myself. I take it to the field whenever I am shooting for multiple days. Last November, I was on such a trip. After I had filled up all of my CF cards, I dumped them on the gadget. It was sitting on the roof of my car, and I pushed the power-on, stuck the CF card into the slot, and pushed the Copy button. It took off blinking normally. A minute later, a gust of wind blew it off the roof and down to the gravel parking lot surface. It never missed a byte!

I'm sold.

I have about 2.5GB in CF cards, and the hard disk is only 5GB or so. I might swap it out for a bigger one, maybe 20GB.

---Bob Gross---

[vvizard]

Yeah I feel kind of "ripped off" on this thing. Actually I got the drive as a christmas-gift, but It came without disk, so I bought myself a 30GB disk and inserted in it. That disk might be better off in a laptop I plan on buying soon, if I dont start trusting this thing soon :cry:

[robertwgross]

So, why do you feel ripped-off, if the product functions as it should?

---Bob Gross---

[kiwimichael]

I have an X-Drive II which we use when we take lots of photos (usually vacations). We bought an X-Drive and added a fast 40Gb disk as it was relatively cheap (third of the price of a Phototainer) and is more convenient than taking a laptop which is also more theft prone (you leave it in the car of Hotel).
Up till now it has functioned perfectly and even though it shows that it is transferring data I would prefer a way of checking that the data is actually on the Disk before deleting the images on my CF card. I guess my answer to your question is that I (reluctantly) do trust my X-Drive.

Does anyone know of a way to use my Palm Tungsten to view the images (or data) on the X-Drive?

Michael

[richardtallent]

I just went to DC and NYC for a week and was completely dependent on my new X's Drive Pro. It worked like a charm. I had my laptop at the hotel for previewing at night, but during the day I only had 1x512, 2x256, and 2x128 CF (and I prefer to stick with the 512/256 unless I'm in a pinch).

For the $110 I spent (already had the hard drive in another USB case with no media capabilities), I have a perfectly usable portable hard drive, media reader, photo storage device, and even a marginal MP3 player. Overall, I'm a happy camper.

That said, here are the issues I have had with it:

- Misleading sales literature claims compatibility with any size HD, but any space beyond 30GB is ignored, even while connected via USB.
- No NTFS support, which I only realized after I had screwed it back together and could get nothing but garbage on the LCD screen.
- The LCD is fine in the dark, but washes out in daylight. Not that you need to see it much to copy the cards.
- No "overall progress" status. Not a big deal, I just stuff it back inside my bag while it copies, it powers itself down afterward.
- Copying/moving files between HD and media cards from within Windows is sloooow: makes the whole USB round trip. You have to unplug the USB and use its own copy feature to get decent performance.

[vvizard]

So, why do you feel ripped-off, if the product functions as it should?

---Bob Gross---

Cause normally I don't have trouble trusting gadgets, but the X-drive I've just not gotten comfortable to trust. Probably as you say, because I can't verify that the data is there.. And to your other question, of viewing files on our Tungsten-devices: Not impossible, but sure not easy either.

You will need a way to connect the devices. The easiest way will probably be to get a cable with a palm-connector in one end, and a USB-interface matching the X-drive's in the other. Another option that (possible) might work, is an SDIO-"dummy"-card with an attached cable ending an an USB-plug to connect to the X-drive. Either way from then on it would only become a programming-issue. Getting the cable would surely make me blow dust off my PalmOS Programming bible (For OS-5). Off topic: I just can't wait until new Tungsten-devices (if they keep the name) comes with the Cobalt-OS (OS6). Memory-protection and background-threads.. Halleluja :)

[Scottes]

I've got an X's Drive II and I kinda feel the same way. When I copy something to it I'm always waiting for the time when something goes wrong. Hasn't yet, and it's just about full so I've copied a number of cards to it. I wish it had a Verify option, and I wish it had some type of log - when it's done it just turns off, so I'd love to see a "Last Operation Successful" message whenever I turn it on.

When I get the cash I want a better one, but so far it's already paid for itself.

[J.A.F. Doorhof]

No problems here also.
I use it ALOT and never lost a picture.

HOWEVER I would also love to see something on the screen, but I can perfectly life without it when I think about the money I have to pay more for a display.

Battery life is the only real concern for me, but I never run out to be honest.

Speed is also a real concern, I use a 1GB pro-speed CF card and it takes ages to get it on the drive, this would be a reason to switch to another drive but as far as I heard they all have arround the same speed issues.

Greetings,
Frank

[jtfoto]

Absolutely no problems with my X-Drive pro with 30GB drive. I have just returned from a week shooting at one of our central Australian national Parks. I took over 2500 shots and I must have used the X-Drive a dozen plus times which included recharging with the supplied car chargerand the thing performed just as designed. I trust it now.

[Case]

No probs with mine (X-Drive pro) either.....and mine got battered around Cambodia on the back of my bike! I'm very happy with it...

Chris

[Scottes]

Hmmm.... 7 cases of "it works fine" and 0 cases of problems... I'm starting to feel better....

[jyrgen]

Considering buying one, thanks guys for feedback!

[f8]

had one for 2 years now (x drive2) never let me down, i would also like to check if images have transferred correctly before wiping the cf card

[FJC]

Doesn't the X-Drive Pro have that file-transfer information displayed on an lcd screen, and the ability to let you browse through the file names that are on the drive?

[neil_r]

I have had the early X Drive for over a couple of years (the one with the flashing LEDs) never had a problem & never lost a file (out of 1000's) However the battery is now totally knackered and it needs a re-charge after about 3 1Gb downloads.

Time for the X Drive Pro I think.

N

[pradeep1]

If you are so paranoid about it, carry along a portable CD-R burner in addition to your X-Drive. That way you will have a "hard" copy on CD-R as backup. I saw one somewhere that you can plug into your car's DC out and burn CD-R from your CF cards.

With CDRs being basically free, I see no worry in burning one disk for every 512 MB card I use up. Heck, you can even burn two CDRs if it makes you feel better. It will take you a good 15 minutes to burn two CDRs and use your X-Drive, but your chances of ever not getting your data is very slim then.

What do you think?

[OviV]

If you have an iPaq and want to look at the pictures on you X-Drive, there is one possibility that I know of but it is expensive:

http://www.mobileplanet.com/product.asp?cat%5Fid=109&cat%5Fname=Accessories&de pt%5Fid=3240&pf%5Fid=MP540386&listing=1

However I don't think there is any software out there for the iPaq to read RAW images.

[where1]

I have an X-Drive II. I had a problem with it. The hard drive went bad. The X-Drive warned me of the fact when I tried to transfer to it from the CF. I lost no pictures because of it. The seller installed a new hard drive for me under warrantee and I've had no problems since. In fact I always use it, even if I dump my CFs directly into the computer, as a backup. When I get backups made from the computer, I clear the files off the X-Drive.

[robertwgross]

Hmmm.... 7 cases of "it works fine" and 0 cases of problems... I'm starting to feel better....

The problem is that there may be a hundred users out there who tried it and it blew up on them. Not likely.

---Bob Gross---

[cowman345]

You know, I felt the same way about the X's drive II. It always worked, but it would make me nervous. So I hocked it on ebay and upgraded to a X's Drive Pro (so I can verify my data is there!) and feel SOOOO much more comfortable using it (despite the fact that the power off switch doesn't work).

-dave-

[theoldmoose]

I had a lot of problems with it initially, dropping connects to a desktop system with USB 2.0 ports running an older Win98 with motherboard-manufacturer supplied USB 2.0 drivers.

Even after upgrading (actually wiping and reloading) the OS to Win2K Pro, I've had enough problems that I almost always use my Win98 laptop with the slower USB 1.1 port to copy pictures from the drive.

In at least instance, during all the flurry of 'unsafe removal of device' and refreshing explorer hiccups under Win2K, the formatting of the drive was smashed. And this was during a *read* operation, of all things. I was forced to use my dual-boot laptop running Linux to re-partition and re-format the drive, because neither Win98 nor Win2K would touch it any more.

Fortunately, in that instance, I had not wiped the CF card in question, so I ended up not losing any pictures.

I find that the downloadable firmware updates (if you can even find them) oft times either refuse to install, or the updated instructions don't match the GUI of the software it describes. There were at least two different 'official' sites offering updates, and in general, they never had the same versions, and the version numbering was inconsistent, such that you really couldn't tell which was the lastest and greatest. The whole support issue leaves me wondering if anyone at Vosonic understands how to release code to users in the field at all.

And the drive *still* chokes on long filenames that include legal (for Windows filesystems, that is) characters (like ones found in MP3 artist/title/track names), and I've found that I cannot copy large (2GB VmWare virtual drive image) files over that cross the initial 4GB boundary in the 6GB drive I have installed. These are all known problems, but Vosonic doesn't seem interested in fixing any of them. The embedded OS is VxWorks, apparently with some broken implementation of the FAT32 filesystem. At least an embedded Linux would have a better stab at properly supporting FAT32, I would suspect.

And finally, I agree with a previous poster that the way the drive just turns off after doing a successful copy, and doesn't display a 'feel good' message when you turn it back on, is just plain bad user interface design. For instance, if the battery runs down during a copy operation, you will get essentially the same result (the unit turns off, and you haven't a clue as to why). Since batteries will rebound a bit after resting, you can even turn the drive back on and see a bar on the display, and not realize that the unit may have powered down prematurely.

Does the drive make me nervous? Yep, it sure does. So far, I haven't been brave enough to wipe a CF after copying it over. I have two 512 MB CFs, and shoot in RAW on a 300D, so I get about 64 images a piece, or 128 total. I do copy the CFs over to the drive (which takes essentially forever at the glacial CF interface speeds it uses), but so far have declined to wipe the CFs until I get back to the hotel room and download them to my laptop. So, the drive is just insurance, in a way, against breaking/losing a CF card, I suppose.

I'm seriously thinking about the new CD-R writer that came out a while ago, (the apacer disc steno cp-200) that features spanning CD's, etc., and has a nice viewable OLED display. I'd really rather burn 512MB CD's as I go. It kills two birds with one stone, anyway. My laptop doesn't have a CD burner, and I tend to get lazy about burning backups after I get home. Making a couple of backup CD's in the field, while the data's 'hot', would make a lot of sense to me.

[Guillermo Freige]

I've a Xdrive-II, but never used it as a "copy CF card" device until now except for some test copies from my Tugnsten SD card and the Rebel and S50 CF cards and microdrive. All worked fine.
I use the Xdrive a lot as a external USB 2 drive to share things (audio, video files) between my notebook, my PC and to carry info to other PCs, and as a CF reader connected via USB. So I use it a lot (almost everyday), and neved had a problem. I'll use as a CF copy device during my next trip, and using the notebook as a backup and review device.

Guillermo

[vvizard]

I had a lot of problems with it initially, dropping connects to a desktop system with USB 2.0 ports running an older Win98 with motherboard-manufacturer supplied USB 2.0 drivers.


I also have problems with it dropping connections under Linux. Read/Write operations bail out with the driveseek { not ready } (or such) dumping at fast pace to stdout.


In at least instance, during all the flurry of 'unsafe removal of device' and refreshing explorer hiccups under Win2K, the formatting of the drive was smashed. And this was during a *read* operation, of all things. I was forced to use my dual-boot laptop running Linux to re-partition and re-format the drive, because neither Win98 nor Win2K would touch it any more.


Cool, I tried initially to partition/format my drive from Linux with fdisk and mkfs.vfat -F32 /dev/sda1, but the process took like forever, so I thought it had run into problems, hanging. I've created 30GB vfat-partitions under Linux in seconds.. Later I realize this probably has to do with the (relatively) slow USB-2.0 connection, bottlenecking the filesystem-writes. Anyway I used fdisk to remove the partition-table and tried doing this on my vmware'd win2k instead. First of all I went into problems with win2k not recognizing partitionless disks (how silly).. So after a while I found the tools for the X-drive which made it possible to at least start the format. I also upgraded to the latest firmwire while at it. In win2k it now show up with the disk itself and the cardreaders. In Linux I only get the disk itself, not the card-readers :/ I find it strange, as this is probably the only "Guaranteed to work with Linux" device I have, and by far the one working the poorest with it ;) I got more "uncommon" hardware with no such guarantee which works fine. Bluetooth-dongles, Palm-cradles, wifi-cards, etc etc. The X-drive claims to work out of the box with any Linux-2.4 kernel. I'm running 2.6, but I don't think anything major have been changed in the usb-storage module. At least all my other hardware using the same module never got any trouble after switching to 2.6. Do you got the card-readers to show up in Linux? If so, how/where? They're not showing up as scsi-disks in my system as I guess they should, only the main-disk of the X-drive does..


And the drive *still* chokes on long filenames that include legal (for Windows filesystems, that is) characters (like ones found in MP3 artist/title/track names), and I've found that I cannot copy large (2GB VmWare virtual drive image) files over that cross the initial 4GB boundary in the 6GB drive I have installed. These are all known problems, but Vosonic doesn't seem interested in fixing any of them. The embedded OS is VxWorks, apparently with some broken implementation of the FAT32 filesystem. At least an embedded Linux would have a better stab at properly supporting FAT32, I would suspect.


Amen! I have also suspected the FAT-implementation on the X-drive to be bad since I've had so much Linux-trouble with "disk-errors". It could be the disk of course, but I bought the disk brand new right after the drive, and I don't find any troubles with it on win2k-machines, so I find it hard to believe it's the drive itself that got trouble.

I think I'll try trashing the partition-table on it, and recreate the filesystem from Linux now, to see what happens.. wish me luck :-P I just have to sell it if I can't get it to work good "trustworthy" in Linux :(

[theoldmoose]

Most of my problems seemed to have stemmed from particular USB 2.0 chipsets. I've used the drive successfully at work on both a Win2K and XP system, with USB 2.0, with nary a hiccup (except for the illegal filename character and 4GB boundary problems). And it has always run properly on my laptop, both under Win98 and Linux, using the USB 1.1 port that is on there.

I don't recall if I saw the media slots the last time I had the drive mounted under Linux or not. I recall that the the drive itself showed up as /dev/sda (the raw drive). Maybe the media slots started at /dev/sda4 (the first 'extended' partition).

If I get the chance, I'll take a look to see how things are currently set up. I currently running SuSE 8.1 on may Linux laptop, which is a 2.4 kernel.

[Guillermo Freige]

I've used my xdrive even conected to Linux machines via USB2 without problems (as a disk and a CF reader). My 30Gb disk was originally formated using linux in fat32, and not windows (winxp refuses to generate a 30Gb fat partition) so probably that was part of the origin of the success! :)
Regarding the media slots, they appear as other disks (sdb, sdc, sdd, etc)
and not as partitions of the primary disk. In fact they have their own partitions, and the actual filesystem are sdb1, sdc1, etc.

[vvizard]

They don't show up here :/ Only scsi-disk in this system showing up when the Xdrive connects is the /dev/sda1 which is the partition of the harddrive inside the drive. I got no other partitions on sda showing up, and no other scsi-disks like sdb, sdc, sdd etc. It's no big deal, since I use a USB-2.0 cardreader from SanDisk which works perfectly, but it sure doesn't help me trust my X-drive :/

[theoldmoose]

Oh yeah. Now I remember. Thanks.

I think that most of my USB 2.0 woes stem from a particular chipset that is in my desktop Win2K machine. It is Intel-based, but I believe an early version. The motherboard is an ASUS P4B-544E (I think, I don't have it in front of me at the moment), with bult-in USB 2.0 and firewire. The firewire works just fine with my Canon camcorder, by the way.

[Guillermo Freige]

They don't show up here :/ Only scsi-disk in this system showing up when the Xdrive connects is the /dev/sda1 which is the partition of the harddrive inside the drive. I got no other partitions on sda showing up, and no other scsi-disks like sdb, sdc, sdd etc. It's no big deal, since I use a USB-2.0 cardreader from SanDisk which works perfectly, but it sure doesn't help me trust my X-drive :/

It's not Xdrive fault, but Linux kernel. You must enable SCSI multi-LUN support in it and use a recent one.

[vvizard]

I've enabled "CONFIG_SCSI_MULTI_LUN", and recompiled. Rebooting to see if it works now :) Thanks for the help, I feel a bit stupid right now =P

[vvizard]

It worked fine thanks. So I opened sda with fdisk, deleted the _FOUR(???)_ partitions on it. Created a new one, and quited fdisk. I then reloaded the usb-storage subsystem to have it re-read the attached devices, and then my newly created sda1 shows up. I run "mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sda1", and it completes in a second. So I open up sda in fdisk again, and now, I got four partitions once again. Fdisk now reports this when opening the device:



Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sda: 30.0 GB, 30005821440 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 28615 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 ? 937477 1203315 272218546+ 20 Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 ? 649505 912677 269488144 6b Unknown
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3 ? 263179 945973 699181456 53 OnTrack DM6 Aux3
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda4 * 680971 680981 10668+ 49 Unknown
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Command (m for help): q


I've seriously no idea what's going on now. At least the card-readers show up now, but the disk itself is acting stranger than ever. I'm about so close to replace the fat32 partition with a reiserfs one, and use it only for a mobile harddrive between my own computer, my fathers laptop :([/code]

[Guillermo Freige]

Try powering off and on the xdrive

[vvizard]

Oh yeah, and when I try to mount any of the four partitions which it reports exist on sda, It only says the drive is missing it's superblock :(

When I created the partition on it, I only let the partition-type stand as "Linux" in fdisk, since Linux doesn't care what the partition-type is set to, it only cares about the filesystem it's been formatted to. Think it's possible that the X-drive could care about this, and really freak out when it didn't find it's partition in the FAT32-format, starting a "partition-creation-spree" :-P I'll try again, but fdisk still reported four partitions on it when I first opened it today, and the last format of the drive was with the "proper" windows-tools from the X-drive homepage

[vvizard]

Try powering off and on the xdrive

I do it. After every change to the disk, I power it off, modprobe -r usb-storage, to have the hotplug-manager forget about all drives attached, then I power it on again. The hotplug-system detects it, and reads in the drive-information.

But everything is going so slow when working with this drive here :( Just pressing "q" in fdisk to quit it without storing changes, take minutes from enter is pressed until fdisk quits, and returns me my shell :/ And then, I can't open it with fdisk again until it's been powered off/on.. I might never have trusted this thing before, but todays experiments sure haven't helped much in the direction of me ever gaining trust in it ;)

I think I soon have to attach the drive from it on a laptop to actually verify that the drive itself haven't gotten screwed

[Guillermo Freige]

To be honest, I've never tried to format the disk already mounted in the X-drive. I've just formated it in the notebook, booting from CD with Knoppix. All worked ok.
Also, to use a disk partitioned witk OnTrack DiskManager in the XDrive seems a recipe to a disaster to me. Just use "traditional" partitions.

[vvizard]

So.. I deleting all the four partitions, I created a new one, set the type to "b" (WIN95 FAT32). Also got the option of "WIN95 FAT32 LBA", but I don't know what LBA stands for, so I didn't pick it. I wrote the new partitiontable, shut off the xdrive, "modprbe -r usb-storage", then turned it on again. Now it showed my sda1 partition (and that was reported to be the only partition on it). I ran "mkfs.vfat -F32 /dev/sda1" and it took about two minutes. But the problems haven't stopped unfortunately.


merlin mnt # ls -alF /dev/sd*
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 33 May 4 21:43 /dev/sda -> scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 34 May 4 21:43 /dev/sda1 -> scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 33 May 4 21:43 /dev/sdb -> scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun1/disc
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 34 May 4 21:43 /dev/sdb1 -> scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun1/part1
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 33 May 4 21:43 /dev/sdc -> scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun2/disc
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 33 May 4 21:43 /dev/sdd -> scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun3/disc


Looks OK. It find the drive, and the cardreaders. It find one partition on the harddrive (sda1), and one partition on my microdrive (sdb1) which is inserted at the moment.


merlin mnt # mount /dev/sda1 scsi1/
merlin mnt # mount
/dev/hda5 on / type reiserfs (rw,noatime)
none on /dev type devfs (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw)
/dev/hda6 on /tmp type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/hda7 on /var type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/hda8 on /usr type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/hda9 on /home type reiserfs (rw)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
none on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
/dev/sda1 on /mnt/scsi1 type vfat (rw)
merlin mnt #


So far so good, it's mounted as a fat-partition in read-write.


merlin mnt # df -h /dev/sda1
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 28G 16K 28G 1% /mnt/scsi1
merlin mnt #


still looks good. But now things start to get hairy :-P

merlin mnt # ls -alF scsi1/
ls: scsi1/dcim: Input/output error
ls: scsi1/XsDriveIIVP2060_21: Input/output error
ls: scsi1/XsDriveIIVP2060_14: Input/output error
total 33
drwxr--r-- 7 root root 16384 Jan 1 1970 ./
drwxr--r-- 7 root root 16384 Jan 1 1970 ./
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 240 Mar 22 03:30 ../
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 240 Mar 22 03:30 ../
merlin mnt #


Notice the directories "." and ".." there's two of each =D not to mentioned the initial I/O error reported :/ Let's try another thing..


merlin mnt # touch scsi1/test.txt
touch: cannot touch `scsi1/test.txt': Read-only file system
merlin mnt #


So all of a sudden, it's now a read-only filesystem, although mount says it's mounted read/write, and I've verified proper vfat-support in kernel. Now I'm really clueless :-P

[vvizard]

To be honest, I've never tried to format the disk already mounted in the X-drive. I've just formated it in the notebook, booting from CD with Knoppix. All worked ok.
Also, to use a disk partitioned witk OnTrack DiskManager in the XDrive seems a recipe to a disaster to me. Just use "traditional" partitions.

I've never used OnTrack DiskManager. That partition (and they're mysterious types) are the partitions which suddenly appeared for a reason I have no idea about. I've only used regular fdisk on it, using partition types of "Linux" and "Win95 FAT32". I might try putting it into my old mans laptop and format it from a cd-based distro myself.

[vvizard]

Think I've made up my mind now. Next time I'm going to the shooting range, the X-drive II will come along, in addition to the usual old harddrives and windows-CD's. I took it out of the drive, replaced a laptop-disk with it, booted up a knoppix-cd to format it, and it wen't fine. Mounted the disk after formatting it, and copied some files on it. Then I took it out of the machine, inserted the original harddrive, and booted it's win2k operating system. I attached the X-drive, and the files where there. So.. I'm back at my own computer, mounts the X-drive, and the files are still there. I'm even able to delete them :) I take 60MB of pictures on my 10D, dumps them to the X-drive. Mount the X-drive and the files are there. But I can't copy them. I just get looooooots of ....


Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 116628
scsi3 (0:0): rejecting I/O to offline device
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 116629
scsi3 (0:0): rejecting I/O to offline device
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 114294
lost page write due to I/O error on sda1
scsi3 (0:0): rejecting I/O to offline device
FAT: unable to read inode block for updating (i_pos 1828706)<3>scsi3 (0:0): rejecting I/O to offline device
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 1
lost page write due to I/O error on sda1


... these messages. So I think the harddrive will be donated to my fathers laptop, and the X-drive will be shot... Literally =P