My favorite ever SO experience was this time I found a dude who had had my exact problem four years earlier. The thread was the only google result for the error message I was getting that wasn't just random pasted log files, etc.

Two people who had no idea how to fix it gave him some useless suggestions, then crickets.

9 months later, he had come back and posted

I solved my problem!

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=5M

I wish I'd saved the link.