[ale] OT. Dead harddrive on laptop

[Cornelis van Dijk]

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.
>
> Pat
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