Well, I promised news, so I'll deliver. I have now had 2 considerably different experiences with Western Digital hard drives. The first one was with the company. I had a 2 gig drive die. 1 week after the MFGR warranty expired! I did not know that it had expired, so was calling WD to see if it was covered. The guy on the phone said "Hold on a minute, let me see if I can extend the normal warranty." he came back and said no problem, they would send me a new drive, and I could send back the old dead one in the box the new one came in.
Cool. Well, unfortunately, I've just finished having a considerably different experience, but at least not with people at the company... I have a nifty keeno 100 MHz Intel box that I decided would make a nice firewall to install LM 8.1 onto. It has a 1.2 gig WD drive and a 1.2 gig drive from someone else. This machine is so old that it does not use DIMMs! It came with around 32 meg of ram as I recall, and I had all kinds of trouble trying to install, so I decided to buy more memory (don't ask!), and when it arrived I happily stuck the new 128 Meg of ram into the machine and started loading. All KINDS of strange things started happening, and the number of times I've (attempted to) re-installed 8.1 on this machine is unbelievable. I even tried dropping to 64 meg just in case it was a memory problem. Then I ran the bootup memory test overnight. No problem. So, the last time I tried installing, I removed the swap partition that was on the WD disk drive. And went swap partitionless (non optimal, I know, especially with only 64Meg of ram!). For the first time since I started working on this machine, it installed fine, and I got all the way to the configure X screen, and foolishly tried to test the setup. Two hours later I'd still not gotten the blue background on the X display! However, as I say, I've never gotten this far in the past, and the only difference seems to be the removal of the WD drive as swap. If I discover anything that changes my mind about WD being a very bad choice as a swap drive, I'll 'post' another email when I do... rc
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