On Mon, 2007-05-21 at 10:22 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Opinions sought: > > I have a friend with a Dell laptop that's old enough to be out of > warranty, but not too old to be useful. > The 20G hard drive in it failed, so I replaced it for him with a 60G > drive a few months ago. > Now that has failed as well, and even if I mount it in a USB enclosure, > it still fails. So the questions are; > Is this a pair of bad drives, or one bad controller? RMA the drive? Can > the controller be replaced, and if so > is it worth it? Should I just tell him to buy a Mac (because he's > thinking of going back to Windows)? In this instance, data recovery > would be nice, but it's not a huge concern.
I should probably also note I lost an Hitachi hard drive in my Dell Inspiron 8100. This was probably due somehow to the unit dropping on the floor. (Faulty engineering because the unit couldn't withstand a slight bump while on the table. ;-) Anyways, I'm guessing I lost the Hitachi drive because it took some abnormal abuse (somehow). Just to be safe, I still replaced it with another (laptop) Seagate drive. Some Dell laptops are notorious of overheating and without using independant BIOS utilities such as i8kutils for controlling the fans, the unit will more then likely over-heat if depending on BIOS fan settings. Also, Dell laptops use to use IBM hard drives until they sold their hard drive business overseas to Hitachi. -- Roger http://www.eskimo.com/~roger/index.html Key fingerprint = 8977 A252 2623 F567 70CD 1261 640F C963 1005 1D61 Mon May 21 16:38:51 PDT 2007 _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
