Is my hard drive thrashed?

[Dan Hensley]

On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 17:59 +0000, tokyoi at mac.com wrote:
> Dan Hensley wrote:
> 
> >[...] I ordered a new hard drive that should arrive tomorrow in case it's a
> >hardware problem.  My motherboard or BIOS may also have something to do
> >with it, but I'm not sure.  Right now my system is up and running
> >because I built a boot floppy.  But I see another kernel update waiting
> >to be installed.  I hesitate to download it because I don't know what
> >kind of mess it will make with my system.
> >
> 
> 
> Say,
> 
>   man yum
> 
> and have a look at the exclude option -- if you're happy with a kernel 
> you can stop yum updating it until, say, a security issue makes updating 
> the kernel a good idea.

I know how to exclude updates.  The point is that twice in the past
month after doing updates GRUB has been thrashed on my boot disk so it
won't boot.  And this time it was difficult to fix.

I don't know if it's due to a hardware problem (hard drive?
motherboard?) or due to yum, or rpm, or grub, or something else.  It
seems that no one else knows.  But it's also apparent that I'm not the
only one to have experienced this.  So it makes me suspect that it's a
software problem.

Dan