more laptop woes

[forgotten_aria]

Do I did the viao recovery (translation, blow away everything) and now that hard drive won't fail at all. Now how am I supposed to make it fail if the computer is useless. I don't really want to reinstall linux on a drive that has shown enough badness that I know it's bad. Sony won't RMA the computer unless it fails in the preisting clean state. I don't know what the hard drive has stopped failing completely after yesterdays bout of 8 "operating systems not found" and I don't know how to make it fail when I can't really use it with out corrupting the recovered state that is the only way sony will talk with me. Greg had the wonderful idea that his old MIT laptop had a 48G disk in it. 48G is enough space, but it turned out that the HD was too tall, which now brings up the issues of which laptop drives available for purchase are also too tall. I'm really faced witht eh fact tha the only three things I can do right now are lie to sony, claiming's failed and hope that they fix it, without it failing, which will likely be true even if it does fail and I don't have to lie to them, reinstall linux on the bad drive and just live with it for a while, or spend $120 on a new driving, trying to figure out which drives have the 9.5mm height since many of the venders JUST DON'T SAY!! Number one is not an option. I won't lie. I might give it a chance if it does fail, but I'm not holding my breath. That leaves me the other two, both of which cost me in time or money and irritation.

EDIT: I think tha tI've decided to reinstall linux, use the drive until it fails completely or is so irritating I can't stand it any longer. If it fails completely before November, then I do the recovery process, phone sony and get it RMAed, if it just irritates me, then maybe, if I'm lucky, 60G laptop HDs will have gone down in price.

EDIT2: I love my little kobuns, even when they are annoyed.

Comments

[zkzkz.livejournal.com]

What's the manufacturer of the drive? If you're sure it's the drive that failed you can probably just RMA it to the drive manufacturer. They normally have 3 year warrantees.

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

We checked the manifacture's page. they won't honor a waerrente from a drive included in a system. It's a toshiba, if I'm remember correctly now.

[totient]

The stock drive is 9.0mm, not 9.5. That's tricky because a lot of replacement drives out here are just a tiny bit too tall. You can squeeze them in by scraping off some of the foam stuff inside the case, and I've heard lots of stories of people doing this successfully, but a 9.0mm drive is better. That said, all of the drives I've seen advertised as 9.0mm by vendors have been listed as 9.5 by the manufacturers.

href="http://tinyurl.com/4mf47">This drive is reasonably big and reasonably cheap. And there are definitely bigger drives out there.

[zkzkz.livejournal.com]

What made you think it didn't fail under windows? Did you run any disk testing programs under windows?

Usually just one section of the disk fails because it runs out of spare blocks to remap the dead blocks to. It's possible that's just way out at the end of the drive and windows never got to it.

I would run some disk testing program (don't know any for windows, sorry) to thoroughly test it. My drives were Maxtor and Maxtor has a dos boot floppy with a testing program. Maybe Toshiba has something similar?

If you reinstall linux consider leaving badblocks -w running on it for a few nights. That might finally kill off the bad drive if it's just managing to remap the bad blocks sometimes.

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

It wouldn't give hte errors. I can't run test programs or realyl anything, since sony won't service a system that isn't failing under the pristine conditions.

It really sonds like there is a bearing or head problem, since it's not repeatable or predictable. I really don't think it's a bunch of bad sectors, since it sometimes can't find the boot sector.