ThinkPad Now Working; So the Maxtor External Drive Broke

So I put the new 100GB drive in the ThinkPad; load Windows, Office, Firefox and so on; do a whole mess of updates.
And while reorganizing what litte I had saved the Maxtor 200GB external drive takes a dive. No, not on the ThinkPad; it's connected to the home desktop computer. No, it's not a virus; these machines are well protected. It's just dumb bad luck.

Thus I have spent that last 2 days debugging the problem and basically the drive is trash. Low level formats/erases don't help (not for long anyway - the drive errors again after an hour or 2 of activity).

Tomorrow I'm off to the shop for a new one. Hopefully I've managed to backup the whole drive and won't lose too much.

So, I won't be writing about the suckling pig I'm also cooking.