Tech Saturday
Why does everything have to break at once?
I have an OLD Compaq desktop machine that has long served as the household music server/music burner machine. It is networked, runs Squeezecenter, and is hooked into my stereo, so I can listen to tunes at home or remotely. The old gal still has enough power to handle whatever music tasks I throw at her. But of late, the music hard drive has had some issues. The music is all backed up, but I've known for a few weeks now the hard drive needed to be replaced. So the replace/rebuild got done over the past couple of days. No big deal. The old gal is running just fine again, which is cool.
While doing that bit of maintenance on Friday, I thought it would be a good idea to check up on the health of the Thinkpad's drive. Ugh. A backup revealed a file with errors. CHKDSK revealed more problems, some of which it didn't seem to want to repair. And the drive failed one of PC-Doctor's five tests -- an early sign of a failing drive. A call to IBM/Lenovo support confirmed my failing-drive diagnosis, and in less than ten minutes, the support call was resolved with the tech promising a replacement drive that might arrive by Monday but certainly by Tuesday (he wasn't just blowing smoke -- two previous hardware support calls resulted in replacement parts being shipped that fast, which is why my next laptop will be a Lenovo Thinkpad).
Cool enough, but I have been wanting a bigger hard drive anyway. So I tracked down a compatible drive (not such an easy task, as it turns out, for the T43) at MicroCenter, installed the thing (one screw removed, two screws on the drive cage removed, cage attached to new drive with the two screws, snapped into place, screw reattached -- it's SO easy to work on a Thinkpad), restored the saved drive image from an external drive with ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery, and the machine is back in business. And this drive runs quite a bit cooler than the original, according to the temp sensor. When the replacement for the original arrives, I'll probably image it with my current backup, just in case, and store it.
Both music server and Thinkpad are working normally, finally. Not the most exciting Saturday, but a little preventive maintenance sure beats losing 40GB of music or a bunch of stuff on the Thinkpad.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 06/14/08 21:36 | Tech | Technorati
Previous Entry | Home | Next Entry
TrackBack
There are currently no trackbacks for this item.
Incoming trackback pings have been disabled because of abusive spammers. Technorati is now used to track cross-blog conversation.
Comments
No comments yet. Add yours?
Add Comments
While it is not required, creating an account for commenting provides a number of benefits (such as comment editing and bypassing the captcha challenge). You may log in to your account here.
No flames or impolite behavior. Any questions, see the site policies. Older posts are moderated (because of spammers), so if your post does not appear immediately, that could be why.
HTML will be stripped. URLs will be transformed into hyperlinks.
[b]text[/b] will produce bold text. [i]text[/i] will produce italicized text.
Comments for this post must be approved before being published. Thank you!
BLOG
» Create Account
» Log In
DISCLAIMER
Content and design copyright © 1997-2008, Kevin Whited.
Posts represent the views of Kevin Whited (and occasional guest bloggers) only, and do not necessarily reflect the views of employers, family, friends, or significant others.