I installed last night and have been doing a dd image of a friends 250G HDD that crashed on her.
She lost all her school work for this past semester and all of her family photos so I'm doing a nice slow bs=512 image.
It's been running since 11:30 last night after I upgraded the kernel with no problems except two Input/output errors of about 10 bytes each so far and I'm at 220G now.
Hopefully I can salvage something for her, I told her sh!t you don't have backed up is sh!t you don't care about losing.
I'm going to make her a wall that says (Debbie Does Backups!) she probably won't get it.

[Edit to add]
The kernel has been running smooth as silk!