About six months ago, the hard drive of my laptop crashed and given that I had a paper due two days later, I needed a quick solution and together with mjg59 (i.e. him doing the work, me idly wondering about the world) replaced the disk with a spare one I had. Unfortunately, the disk is in an enclosure which uses very tiny screws for which nobody has a screwdriver. Since I needed a working laptop immediately, we just took the whole enclosure out and put another drive without enclosure in. Since then, I wanted to send the drive in to get a replacement but I first had to get it out of the enclosure. After unsuccessfully asking around for such a special screwdriver and procrastinating for a few months, I finally figured that I should make use of the fact that I'm based in the department of engineering. And, indeed, there are people who actually do Real Stuff and have Real Tools. So I managed to get the drive out of the enclosure yesterday, phoned HP support for a new drive, and voila, less than 24 hours later I had my replacement. The new drive even uses normal screws, showing that HP learned their lesson. I've dealt with HP support several times and so far they have always been excellent.
Since I finally got my bigger drive back, I spent the afternoon implementing the project that has been on my list for a while: use encryption for both my home and root partitions. After syncing the data over and playing around with mkinitrd for a while, I got it working without any problems.