I have two seperate questions, the first may relate to Ronn's problems. 1. Over the last year my niece and nephew have gone through four hard drives. These were name brand, WD, store bought hard drives. Two of the failures were instantanious, two built up over weeks until it was obvious that something was wrong. Is there any notices about hard drive failures? The real question: what do you experts do to look ahead for problems? I know I can't get teenagers to do any weekly checks, but could these problems been avoided?
2. From Alberto's message, I was wondering about something. From the little work I did with NT, it seemed like passwords were hidden. If a user lost or forgot his password, the only thing a sysadmin could do is reset the users system, the user had to input a new password. The sysadmin couldn't see what the actual password was. I take it that this is not true accross all systems? Obviously if I lost my password for Amazon.com, it could be e-mailed to me, but I just figured that some hidden mechanism was involved in this. My password was kept on the system but no person other than me could see it. Just wondering. Kevin T.
