System failure

So. Encountered an error, have we? Let's see what it is. Repeat the problem. Show us.

But it never works when we need it to. Or rather, it never fails. It only fails to fail. Or... well, you know what I mean. I'm sure you have had much the same happen if you have ever taken your laptop to tech support.

My computer has been crashing. Well, I'll call it that... all the colours streaking across the screen, network, ui, reads, writes all fail and the processor just stops. The computer admits nothing. On Windows, it does not shutdown to avoid damage. On FreeBSD, it does not shut down the daemons and wait for input. It dies. Hold the power button and restart, and it does not even notice anything happened. I'll call it crashing, because saying it has a stroke is just a little too close to home.

Of course the tech support people found nothing in the dashboard, or whatever the booted at the time operating system happened to call it. The notification area, though I notice none of them call it that. Of course they didn't find the problem.

And of course it did not repeat.

System Report:

A call to OS function failed.

The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable.

The filesystem structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable.

Oh.

Looks like my hard drive has failed.

I'm sure it will fix itself when I take it to tech support.