WHEEE ding-ding boingy boingy WHOO WHOO!

[giza]

The above is a dramatic re-enactment of what the laptop that I use at the office for development did yesterday. I had been having problems with it for some time. For example, I'd come in on Monday morning and watch the screensaver free when I tried unlocking it, and could not ssh in, which forced me to reboot the box. I had this happen several times, but there could be number of causes for it, such as a bad mainboard or a flaky kernel (I'm running Gentoo, where stability is optional ;-).

I figured that sooner or later something would give, and it finally did when I came on Monday. I had the same symptoms, but when I rebooted got the lovely message of "Primary Disk 0 not found" accompanied by a rather loud *click* *click* *click*. Since it was a Dell, I flipped the laptop over, got the "express service code", and typed it in on the website. It had a 1 year warranty, which expired 6 days later. Talk about great timing! So I called it in to their tech support, and they actually walked me through the process of removing and reseating the hard drive. (It was in the same cage as the PCMCIA slot, who'd have thought?) When that failed to fix the problem, they overnighted a new drive, which arrived this morning. So that was my office excitement of the week.

While attempting to deal with my dead hard drive, I did some searching for boot/recovery disks, and I found this little gem: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/. It is pretty much the first, last, and only boot CD you'll ever need. It has well over 50 programs on it doing disk diagnosis, mainboard tests, memory tests, benchmarks, virus scanning, and more! It's an amazing tool, and I found one useful utility in the hard disk section called "Drive Fitness Test". It's apparently for IBM drives, but will work on any drive that I tested it on.

Oh, and when my hard drive started working again, I used one of the disk erasure utilities to perform a DoD 5220-22-M compliant erasure of the hard disk. Take that, Dell! :-)

I also played around with a S.M.A.R.T utility on that disk, and took some time to learn how S.M.A.R.T actually works. I had a bit of difficulty understanding how the reading worked, until I realized that most of them were abstract values that count down from either 100 or 200. I found this FAQ to be really helpful: http://www.z-a-recovery.com/smart_faq.htm

I can't wait until I get my new work hard drive set up tomorrow and can actually use my laptop again. :-P

[Edit: Whoa, I forgot all about the utility burnatonce! It is a handy little utility for Windows systems that lets you burn a CD from an ISO. It proved to be rather valuable when I had to make my boot CD but the only working machine I had was running Win XP. ]