Another Dead Hard Drive
May. 20th, 2006 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeThe hard drive on the replacement PC continued to report errors yesterday. I lost patience with it and wrote to Dell technical support asking them to replace it. As I expected, they wanted me to go through a bunch of troubleshooting steps. I did so. Surprisingly, re-seating the hard drive caused the computer to recognize it again, at least long enough to run the Dell Diagnostics tool. Not surprisingly, the diagnostics founds loads of bad-sector errors. I reported the error codes to Dell, and they told me, "Your hard drive has failed." (Duh!) "We will send you a new one with software loaded." Well, that might work, but I may just wipe the drive they send me reinstall everything from the OS disks that I have here, so as to avoid all of the junk that Dell loads onto their Inspirons.
On the other hand, it may be five working days before the new drive shows up, which means it wouldn't be here until the first day of BayCon, and I really want the replacement laptop working before then. Cheryl says she owes me one laptop hard drive anyway, so perhaps we'll drop into Fry's today and see about buying a replacement. Then I'll have a total of two drives, one of which may someday go into Lisa's original machine if we get around to repairing it. And even if we don't, I'd then have a "hot spare" that could be swapped into either machine in case of urgent need of a working hard drive that doesn't need hours of fussing to make it work.
As if we didn't have enough to do this weekend! We have a bunch of errands to run. I have to finish an article I promised to Steve Silver ages ago. I need to go through and transcribe the new Match Game questions onto index cards. (I'm tempted to buy a box of computer-printable ones to save me having to write it all out -- I can type much faster than I can write by hand.) I need to make sure all of the sound props and tapes work. And I also have some contract computer programming to do for Cheryl, subcontracted from one of her clients. Whew!
On the other hand, it may be five working days before the new drive shows up, which means it wouldn't be here until the first day of BayCon, and I really want the replacement laptop working before then. Cheryl says she owes me one laptop hard drive anyway, so perhaps we'll drop into Fry's today and see about buying a replacement. Then I'll have a total of two drives, one of which may someday go into Lisa's original machine if we get around to repairing it. And even if we don't, I'd then have a "hot spare" that could be swapped into either machine in case of urgent need of a working hard drive that doesn't need hours of fussing to make it work.
As if we didn't have enough to do this weekend! We have a bunch of errands to run. I have to finish an article I promised to Steve Silver ages ago. I need to go through and transcribe the new Match Game questions onto index cards. (I'm tempted to buy a box of computer-printable ones to save me having to write it all out -- I can type much faster than I can write by hand.) I need to make sure all of the sound props and tapes work. And I also have some contract computer programming to do for Cheryl, subcontracted from one of her clients. Whew!
