Perhaps I should expand on the bad clusters issue.

The appearance of bad clusters generally means the drive is about to fail. When a bad cluster appears, you need to immediately back up the data, then run scandisk...I like to back up the drive before running scandisk because there is a chance that the entire drive will fail during scandisk. Imagine for a moment there was a speck of dust of the drive. A disk intensive action like a scandisk could expand the problem or cause a catastrophic failure.

These bad clusters appeared in an area on the disk that had never been used. It is possible that what I am seeing is a software error and not a eminent hardware failure. It is also possible that there was a virus in the email that I was deleting when the bad cluster first showed its ugly head.

Since my budget is tight, I am willing to live on the edge for a bit...I will run scandisk once a day for the next several weeks. If another bad cluster appears, then I know the drive will die shortly. However, I have had drives in the past that had bad clusters that went several years without problems. I will never be able to trust the computer with data, but it will work as a web browser. After all...the incredibly important info in my blog is stored at blogger...not at home.

Back to the War

I saw a report on the war about the Fedayeen Saddam. This is a paramilitary group that is really designed to dig in during the war, and to terrorize the Iraq people. They will fight by hiding in civilian clothes. The Fedayeen pulls off stunts like fake surrenders (killing a few Americans and making it harder for Iraqis to surrender) or they might simply shoot Iraqi troops that surrender.

News reports suggest that there are about 20,000 members of the Fedayeen Saddam. As a paramilitary group, the problems of the Fedayeen goes way beyond the logistics of the war, and haunts the logistics of the peace. A paramilitary groups of 20,000 thugs is likely to simply sink into the populace and become an insideous organized crime.

My first reaction to reports on the Fedayeen Saddam is that the only way to win long term peace for Iraq would be to kill as many members of the Fedayeen as possible. The US would have to become like Saddam to win against Saddam. But can the US really win freedom for the Iraqis by killing a large number of Iraqis?

Of course, the existence of the Fedayeen is new to me. The US would have had this information prior to engaging in war. Which means that they knew in advance that they would need to take an extremely heavy handed approach to this group before the war began.

I will stick with my clusters, and hope that living peacefully might someday help peace prevail.