So on the 7th my laptop's hard drive blew up, started having massive failures on various sectors. These days my laptop is basically the only computer I use, and all my small amounts of computer money I have to play with have been directed in its general direction, rather than any other computer that would otherwise be working if it weren't (I spend far less on computers than one might think).
So finally today I picked up a 6GB compact flash while I'm working through western digital's stupid red tape to get my 1.5 month old, purchased retail drive with a 3 year warranty replaced.
It works as a hard drive but sucks when doing heavy writing, like installing software. But the read times are good and I'm thinking if the battery benefits are high enough I may simply roll with this and put the big drive in an enclosure and carry it in my backpack of doom. I'll have to see how I adjust to this. I don't listen to mp3s on this machine, or watch movies, it's basically a web browser with terminals and an IRC client, so 6GB might be all I need when I'm not messing with my digital photos, which I can just whip out the external drive to do.
The kid's in good condition, we're both pretty pleased about that.
Some dickhead hit my cousin's future father in law with a car, and ran off like a coward and left him to die. He ended up bleeding out due to having his hip bone crushed. That's fucked up and angers me.
Work's awesome.
We're doing okay on the grief front w/r/t Becky's mom. Thanks to those who sent flowers, etc, and thanks to those who didn't (we only have room for a few vases, as we're busy taking in stuff from mom's and sorting through it). We appreciate the support we've received from everyone. Thanks!
Also keep in mind that the Thinkpads can roll with that Ultrabay Slim IDE carrier, which may or may not be hotswappable under Linux (I've never owned such a carrier, so I've never tried).
I was also wondering, did you check to see if maybe the thing got killed due to that whole ACPI/APM aggressive power saving issue? A high Load_Cycle_Count ( > 100-200K )in the SMART status might point at that as the culprit. Just a thought.
I was thinking about the ultrabay carrier but i like having two batteries on this bastard. 🙂 I've used one of the carriers and you can eject it and hotload it in windows, I'm pretty sure you can do it in linux too with the right tools.
The device had some bad sectors. I think one of the heads damaged itself.
I don't think i ever felt the drive unload its heads. Unless you use patches, debian doesn't change the journal flush interval in xfs, so something's hitting the drive every 5 seconds.
(On the CF, I'm using ext2 with noatime to avoid writes as much as possible)
I'm glad you are getting the support you need. That's so important.