On Mon, 2008-12-29 at 14:20 -0500, Stanley Brinkerhoff wrote: > I have been running Windows 2008 Server on my laptop for the past 120 > days. Last night it finally gave me a "register or die" message, and > I was going to give Ubuntu a shot as my primary OS. I already run it > on my servers and development laptop, but day to day I still use > Windows. > > I installed it last night, and went to bed with it running updates. > This morning it was turned off, and when I turned it back on it said > something about the machine as shutdown due to thermal failure (!!). > Today at work I was working away ... and the machine became very slow > (it was just idling with some terminal windows open). I shut it down, > picked it up and it literally burned my hands. I let it cool down, and > now it refuses to recognize the harddrive (a replacement works -- yay > for spare parts!). > > Has anyone ever experienced this?? Is there something special you > need to do with a modern-ish Dell laptop to run Ubutnu? Its been > chugging away fine for years on my Dell Latitude X300 and other > laptops. > > LINUX (or some combination of that and bad power management?) KILLED > MY HARDDRIVE! > I suspect that your hard drive simply died. AFAIK there's little likelihood that even something that exercises your drive brutally (like a disk benchmarking test) would heat it to the point that it dies. I think it more likely that the drive heated because the drive main bearing was going, therefore making the platter motor work harder and harder, until it seized, clunk.
If the new drive heats up similarly, then I am of course, completely wrong, and it's a hdparm that is out of bounds for that drive (no, dammit I said spin at 15k RPM not 5400!). But in general that's not possible :) Rubin -- Rubin Bennett rbTechnologies, LLC 80 Carleton Boulevard East Montpelier, VT 05651 (802)223-4448 http://thatitguy.com "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too." Voltaire, Essay on Tolerance French author, humanist, rationalist, & satirist (1694 - 1778)
