Downtime For Me - Sorry

[SirPeale]

Just a quick apology for anyone that has business with me.  Computer hard drive died today.  Was attemping to install a floppy drive, and I'm not sure what happened, but now my hard drive won't boot.  I can read from it fine, but I can't boot from it.

In the interim I took a old, small HD and made a Linux install quickly, as I can't find my XP disc *anywhere.*  It's taken me all day to get online.  I've got an Asus A7N8-X motherboard, and wouldnt' you know it the drivers are only good for Redhat and Suse, and I only have Slackware.  I did find an old NIC that I had drivers for, so I was able to hop online real quick.

Anyway...give me a few days, I've got to get a replacement drive, find my XP CD and copy all my files over.  Woo hoo.

[SirPeale]

This sucks.  I just checked the status of my warranty online.  Guess when it expired?  12/5/2004!  That's right, FOUR FREAKING DAYS AGO.

I had a spare that was semi-working, checked the warranty on that, it expired 9/2004.  That's better than four days, but *damn*.

[stevejt]

I called for a warranty 4 weeks after it expired.  They told me that they will go upto 2 weeks past the expiration date, but not 4.  Try calling them.  The worst they can say is no.

Steve

[SirPeale]

*shrug* I'll give it a shot!  Thanks!

[Lilwolf]

Most manufacturers have low level format tools for their IDE harddrives... Its a last resort, but can bring some drives back from death.

Also, if you have a bad sector, but the drive doesn't recognize it (worse case senerio).  Where it tries to read a sector 10 times... and on the last, it does... so it doesn't mark it bad, but whenever you get to an area of the harddrive it just stalls for minutes... You can fix this also...

Fdisk your drive manually... Create more then one partition (trying to make it so the small partition is just around the bad area... Sometimes it takes a bit to find the right sizings... Then only format the good partitions... And windows will just ignore the rest of the drive.

But all in all... new drives are pretty cheap... might be time for an upgrade.

[Chris]

Back up that drive first thing while you can still read it!  I just had this happen to me and I could read the drive for a few days after the crash, then I lost it completely. 

[SirPeale]

A backup is foremost on my mind, but I have to get another drive to do that.

I hate forced upgrades.

[Stingray]

Back up that drive first thing while you can still read it!

[SteveJ34]

With my hard luck in recent years with IDE hard drives combined with the lower cost of these units, all desktop machines we have placed in my business office combined with my home office boxes have been built with IDE Raid enabled ASUS motherboards or FastTrak controllers with (2) drives mirrored.

Of course, all our servers have always had boot drives mirrored and RAID 5 arrays for storage.

Not trying to spend the money in your pocket but something to consider seeing as you are being forced to upgrade.

[Chris]

I'm probably going to upgrade in February, and I'm thinking of RAIDed SATA drives and using my current 160GB ATA drive to store backups, since my tape backup drive is only 4GB. 

[JackTucky]

But all in all... new drives are pretty cheap... might be time for an upgrade.

Yeah, but you hardly find any good ones in dumpsters,  right Peale?   

Art

[SirPeale]

But all in all... new drives are pretty cheap... might be time for an upgrade.

Yeah, but you hardly find any good ones in dumpsters,  right Peale?   

Actually I've got several that I've found that have been just fine.  Found a 40G with a ton of warez on it, and a couple that I can't read, but which test out fine.  Likely a format is all that's needed.

[SirPeale]

So far this hasn't been too bad.  Got AIM running (tried GAIM,  but there's a ton of dependencies I need, and I finally gave up).

The only thing I haven't been able to do properly is print.  Everything is coming out as PostScript.  Not sure why my printer filter isn't working.