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. ]

Comments

[strangeden.livejournal.com]

ROTFLMAO.

Dude...

[giza.livejournal.com]

Boing boing?

[furahi.livejournal.com]

Your gentoo sure looks a lot like Win 2K ^oo^

I used to use fvwm95, I saw they made a fvwm98, but are they in the 2k's now?

[unciaa.livejournal.com]

> (I'm running Gentoo, where stability is optional ;-)

It's funny because it's true. :D
You've seen nothing until you run the AMD64 edition. Oy vey. Emerging software becomes a complex strategy game of "guess which groups of flags need to be set to ignore, accept or force to see the program in the list. Repeat to successfully get it emerged".

[giza.livejournal.com]

USE=`cat /dev/urandom`

Ah, seriously, I think that stability is one of the bigger problems that Gentoo has. That, and the fact that their geeks just... CHANGE STUFF from version to version of a package with no real reason, which breaks things for people that upgrade from older versions of that package.

Before my hard drive died, my installation SWORE up and down that it was running gcc 3.3.4 instead of 3.3.5, and tried linking to libs under a non-existant 3.3.4 directory. I finally gave up (after searching all through /etc) and created a symlink to get my stuff to compile. :-)

It'd also be nice if they had more binary packages for download. I'll take binary stuff if I can do an upgrade in less than two hours.

[unciaa.livejournal.com]

What annoys me is the general emerge/group system which in places looks very... patched together. In places it seemed to me like they came up with a control system, then when they hit a problem they simply created another subrule that handled it.

And I couldn't for the life of me make examples, because I haven't rebooted to Gentoo ever since my SBLive broke and I switched to my onboard card. No support for nForce3 chipsets, wouldntyaknowit. I had to install it on different hardware, upgrade the kernel, then put the real one in, just to get the onboard network card to work. "You need a network card to update your drivers so you can use your network card." :P


In the end though, Gentoo is just too much work for me. Oh no, I installed 4 programs [after hours of bothering Sundance to help me force emerge to YES JUST FRIKKIN INSTALL THE THING I DON'T CARE THAT IT DOESN'T HAVE THE AMD64 FLAG DAMNIT! annoyances], quick, go correct this and that config file so Gentoo won't go berserk when it does its updating thing. Hey look, it's trying to replace my HD config files with its own that don't work AGAIN, oh boy, aren't I lucky Gentoo is so smart!

If only Debian wasn't so anal about stability. Ubuntu looks interesting, Debian that actually updates, but Sundance says he's heard complaints. Meh. Why isn't there a distro that just works? :/

[giza.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend Ubuntu. It's picking up steam, and it Just Works. It's also not as sluggish as RedHat 9 was on my P3-450, which is important.

One thing to watch out for is the installer. It's very easy to toast your entire partition table. (This may have changed in Hoary, the latest release)

[zorinlynx.livejournal.com]

Boingy Boingy Boingy! Heheheheee heee heeeheheheheee, NARF!

That reminded me of Animaniacs. I loved that show. I miss it. Where is it on DVD, sigh.

That Ultimate Boot CD is too damn cool. I'm still messing with it now. I can't believe this existed so long without me knowing about it!

-Z

[kellic.livejournal.com]

Boingy boingy WHOO definitely sounds like your hard drive crashed. What you need to watch out for is when it goes Chitty chitty bang bang. That basically means that the power supply to the motherboard on your laptop is going bad and is producing an overload.

Then again its nothing to: EPPP EPPP WONK NARF. Had that happen to a desktop in the office. When you hear EPPP EPPP WONK NARF unplug the device from the outlet immediately.


PS- What Pocket PC do you have?

[giza.livejournal.com]

> PS- What Pocket PC do you have?

I don't have any palmtops, only laptops. The one with the hard drive that went bad was a Dell Inspirion 5150.

[netcrimes.livejournal.com]

A Dell? No wonder.

Pfft.

Jayne

[kellic.livejournal.com]

Then why do you have ActiveSync in that screenshot? The green little icon in the bottem right?

[giza.livejournal.com]

Th0at's not a screen shot. As I noted in my post, it's actually a dramatization. :-)

I got the picture in question from spamusement.com (http://www.spamusement.com/), which creates cartoons based on spam subject lines.

[kellic.livejournal.com]

Hard drives can fail no matter who the OEM is. The only thing that can contribute to HD failure and is in the hands of the OEM is shock resistance, heat dissipation, and hard drive burn in. Dell is OK on the former and is great on the latter. I've only seen one Dell model in the last 5 years that had SERIOUS issues with overheating that caused more HD failures in my office then all other laptop models combined.

[netcrimes.livejournal.com]

I think it's more than coincident that *three* people I know have had their Dell computer hard drives fail in the past month alone. I wouldn't take a Dell if it was given to me.

Just IMHO

[kellic.livejournal.com]

Doh! Didn't read that. Hehe.

[unciaa.livejournal.com]

Still not as PITA as Debian's installer, at least. ;)

[firedhusky.livejournal.com]

Dell`s are very prone to fail.

this month only i had
an optiplex power suply die
a poweredge redundant power supply died (poweredge 1750)
and a few weeks ago one of the scsi disks died on a powervault raid system.

none of the machines was more than a year old.

you get what you pay for.

Tho their support is a pain to get throu and they make you do all kind of stupid things that they follow from a guide... they do ship parts prety fast. sometimes even in a few hours. Since they use UPS, fedex or other companies and they stock the mailing companies with dell parts ... all they have to do is tell them to ship it and it comes directly from ups, fedex or dhl warehouses to your door :)

Unfortunatelly, the accounting department likes Dell`s price. so our computers/servers/laptops brand wont change where i work.

but they wouldnt be my first choise. neither compact or hp !

*wags*

FDH

[firedhusky.livejournal.com]

I almost forgot !

they outsource parts and some suport to foreign countries !
so sometimes is a little bit hard to understand the person on the other side.

FDH

[giza.livejournal.com]

I actually had pretty good tech support. I was speaking to a person within a few minutes, he walked me through removing the hard drive from the back, and offered to send me a new one as soon as all the diagnostics turned up negative.

Then again, I work for a large company, so that might have had something to do with that. :-P

[firedhusky.livejournal.com]

nods, our company is not really that big.
Tho whenever i call support, generally know what is wrong and i just need the parts or the warrantie served. So restarting from cero on the troubleshooting is sometimes a bit of an inconvenience.

But i see their point.

*wags*
FDH

[kellic.livejournal.com]

This is the only way I deal with Dell anymore. Even for my personal stuff I go through their corp support. Ask some funky question like what is the max CPU supported on this system. They ask for a Service Tag #, verify that its under warrantee and answer the question. I then just HAPPEN to have one other request. I've given up dealing with their average customer support. The last couple people I dealt with trying to return a defective LCD..well lets put it this way...White Noise is more comprehensible. This is definitely one of those things I always warn people about Dell. Better get your How to speak Hindi book out because you are going to need it if you call Dell. They have made one rather smart move. You might not be able to understand them on the phone but you can read their typing. Dell has online chat and it’s the magic key to getting customer support for the average person.