[ale] OT. Dead harddrive on laptop

[JD]

If the BIOS is stopping the boot, you are screwed at a different level.

If the boot fails due to a drive controller issue, you are screwed regardless of
the disk.

If the boot fails due to the HDD, spinrite is what you want to start with. Go
read the information about it. Is comes as a bootable ISO file and doesn't care
what your OS is.

If your BIOS can't boot from external USB or CDROM, you are gonna need to get
that HDD out and perform spinrite from a different spare system - preferably
able to boot of an optical disk.  You'll need that other system to restore your
backups into a new HDD anyway.

OTOH, you can just drill some holes in the disk and recycle it. That's much
easier than dealing with anything else or spending any money. Right?




On 01/24/2012 08:05 PM, Cornelis van Dijk wrote:
> Thank you all for the quick reply.
> 
> I should have mentioned that the drive does not want to boot anymore,
> it just hangs with an idiot message about a wireless (RealTek) gadget
> which needs its cables checked. As far as I know there is no such
> thing on this laptop.
> 
> The BIOS still sees the drive but not the USB external Seagate. The
> install program of suse 11.2 *does* see the external drive and I guess
> I could install the OS on that, but would it boot?
> Is there a way to force the BIOS to recognize the external drive? I
> can find no mention of the USB drive anywhere in the BIOS (it mentions
> a floppy, but this laptop does not even have a floppy!) Upgrading the
> BIOS is probably also out of the question because of the boot problem.
> It is a Phoenix BIOS from 1999.
> 
> It is kind of hard to see how programs like Spinrite would help if I
> am not able to boot. Sorry for the incomplete information. Good to
> know anyway.
> 
> Also good to know that these thing are user serviceable. It is a
> Fujitsu drive. I guess I have to open the thing up. (A year ago I
> succesfully mucked around inside my Sony Viao, disconnected a faulty
> ventilator fan; thing does not seem to mind.)
> 
> Thanks again and any further help will be appreciated,
> 
> Cor van Dijk
> 
> 
> On 1/24/12, Pat Regan <thehead at patshead.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:22:15 -0500
>> JD <jdp at algoloma.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I looked for 5 yr warranty 7200 rpm HDDs recently - they either do
>>> not exist anymore or are too expensive (2x price) of other HDDs.  3
>>> yr seems to be the new warranty standard for non-cheap HDDs. I
>>> definitely have at least 6 seagates spinning here now - all with 5 yr
>>> warranties that have not expired. I do not expect to replace them
>>> with Seagates when the time comes. I have a long memory.
>>
>> Every manufacturer has been offering three year warranties since at
>> least the late nineties.  Seagate's extra 2 years aren't worth very
>> much.  After three years it isn't worth the shipping cost to replace a
>> small, dead hard drive with a small, refurbished one.
>>