Monday, April 12, 2010

Oh, this really takes the cake

3:28 PM / Technology / Comments2 Comments

Oh, this really takes the cake

Yeah, really fucking descriptive, Mr. Computer. As it turns out, my laptop's hard drive is kaput. Over the last couple of days, I'd been noticing that its performance was steadily decreasing. This morning, assuming that the fault lay with my installation of Windows, I used the included recovery DVD to restore the drive to its original factory settings. About 50% of the way through the process, I got the informative message you see above. I rebooted the system, only for it to fail during the POST, with the following message:

Pri Master Hard Disk:S.M.A.R.T. Status BAD, Backup and Replace

Well, what do you know? It's a Seagate. Quel shocker, to quote GINGER SNAPS. The funniest part is that Seagate's own proprietary disc diagnostic tool, SeaTools, wasn't able to detect that one of its own hard drives was close to collapse. It gave the thing a clean bill of health less than half an hour before it hit the skids. I'm currently waiting for ASUS's tech support department to get back to me, though I'm not sure where I stand as regards the warranty given that I bought the machine second hand on eBay. I would assume that it's transferable, but you never know. If they won't replace it free of charge, perhaps it's time to bite the bullet and replace it with an SSD.

Being without a laptop is something I really don't need right now. I have to turn in a revised chapter of my thesis in less than a month, and I do a lot of writing in my room, which is quieter and less distracting for important work than using my main rig downstairs. Luckily I still haven't got round to selling my old VIAO, so I'm currently in the process of dusting it off and installing the necessary software. Of course, the main reason why I replaced the VIAO in the first place was because its battery was giving up the ghost, so it's absolutely useless in terms of portability.

Good thing I didn't keep anything essential on the laptop drive, eh?

 
2 Comments

1. David S.H. said:

Ouch, sorry to hear that. Do you keep regular backups? I managed to fill my 500GB with backups a couple of weeks ago, so bought a 1TB (931TiB ;D). I paid the same price for the 1TB that I did for the 500GB a couple of years ago lol. I also snagged 75 DVD+Rs for £9, Currys Digital clearance stock, so will probably start regularly backing up to disc too.

(Posted on Monday, April 12, 2010 at 5:29 PM)

2. Author Profile Page Michael said:

Well, as luck would have it, I don't keep anything essential on my laptop anyway. Any documents I have any intention of using on the laptop are on a USB pen drive, of which I have two separate backups which I update regularly (don't worry, I'm not so reckless as to assume that nothing will ever happen to the pen drive!).

If ASUS get back to me and tell me I'll have to pay for a repair, or that it will take more than a couple of weeks, I'll probably just cut my losses and buy a new one to fit myself. Of course, given that I'm currently saving for a system upgrade, this is really the last thing I need right now.

(Posted on Monday, April 12, 2010 at 6:00 PM)

 
To combat spam, commenting is automatically disabled on entries older than 30 days.

Did a comment you tried to post accidentally get eaten by the spam filter? It happens from time to time. I get upwards of 200 spam comments every day and unfortunately don't have the time to weed through all of them in case something genuine ended up there by mistake. If one of your posts gets incorrectly flagged as spam, email me at m.r.mackenzie[at]gmail[dot]com and I'll do my best to retrieve it.

 
Archives
Categories
Recent posts