[Piggy]

I've had to restore from a SD clone a few times and the desktop icons are not restored to their previous location on the desktop. Obviously this is not a major issue but I was wondering why this is the case.

* As to why I've had to restore so many times, well I've had three instances of "disk0s3: I/O error" since purchasing my iMac G5 20" in April. The first time I didn't have verbose start up messages enabled and was new to Macs and goofing around, so I assumed I mucked it up myself. The second time I saw the messages and knew something was wrong. TechTool Pro 4 reported disk errors when I performed a surface scan so I formatted with "0"s then ran another surface scan (it was OK). This last time I IMMEDIATELY ran out and purchased a Seagate drive and will use the Maxtor that Apple sends me as a boat anchor or something.

I have been using PCs for 20 years and not once have any of my numerous drive failures triggered a S.M.A.R.T. alert even when it was obvious the drive was failing. We're talking many different PCs all on UPS power with the drives being Maxtor (mostly), IBM (a couple of times) and I think one Western Digital. I typically replaced the drives every time I would upgrade the PC so the maximum use of any drive was probably 4 years but typically much less. Generally the PCs were left running all the time since Windows suspend and hibernation modes didn't always work (if at all).

I do not believe that S.M.A.R.T. works and manufacturer MTBFs are absolutely worthless. Hopefully the Seagate drive will work for a few years - it has a 5 year warranty...

I’m done ranting now!