I’m looking at error messages from dban, SliTaz, the i586 version of Crux and the Debian network installer and they’re all telling me that the hard drive in the ugly little laptop has finally surrendered.
It was a good run. For a 5Gb, 4200rpm drive that was about 8 years old, I could hardly expect more. This one had definitely reached the end of its life expectancy. Looking back, even in the six months I owned that drive (it was a transplant from the Thinkpad which I bought in September), I must have gone through close to 30 reinstalls, just as many erasures, and add to that the workload of building, compiling, writing and reading regularly. It’s no wonder it died.
This new development does put me in an odd place though. Now I lack a hard drive for a machine I wanted to use for testing for the next few weeks, and will probably need to buy a new one locally. That means it will probably be oversized, and my fear is that it might be incompatible with the BIOS. I guess there’s only one way to find out.
On the other hand, it is rather suspicious that I’ve had two hard drive failures in the past nine months. Maybe it’s bad luck. Or at least, I hope that’s all it is.
Motho ke motho ka botho 
For the short-term, if you really wanted the machine to NOT sit around useless, you could always run the Wolvix LiveCD. It has the ability to save changes to a USB jumpdrive, so you could install things, change configurations, etc, and your changes would all be saved when you rebooted.
I also think a few other distros have this (Puppy comes to mind), but good luck with whatever you do. I’m sure I’ll read about in the near future 🙂 .
Aww, you can’t add another hdd to the ugly kid?
I have two spare laptop drives collecting dust, one of them is yours if you want it. Last I checked both where working; there is a 2.4gb and a 3.0gb.
Email me if you are interested… I’d hate for the “ugly little laptop” to die.
bkanev: I plan to. It’s the picking of the drive that I worry about. Most drives are at least 80Gb that I see, and I know this BIOS still thinks 20Gb is oversized. I hope there’s no upper limit for what the BIOS will accept. …
JiGGaK: Let me think about that. Smaller, older drives are sometimes useful. …
CompactFlash -> IDE adapter plus a cheap CF card would do you well, and you can get in on the solid-state era!