After hours of trying to get IE7 on Linux, I finally succeeded. But I had to boot my laptop up in Windows for one of the steps. I hadn’t booted Windows in ages since I switched to Linux and I thought I’d do a little house cleaning so it wasn’t so darn slow.

Boy I wish I hadn’t.

While in the process of uninstalling all unused programs, I get a BSOD and it shuts down. I’d seen that particular message once before so I’m not too worried. A reboot should fix it just fine. Nope. It doesn’t boot at all. I get a grub error 18. A little searching reveals that it’s a problem on older computers if the BIOS doesn’t support the larger hard drive size that’s in use. Well I don’t have an older computer and it’s been working fine, but I still have hope at this point that it will be a simple fix.

I decide to look around at my BIOS settings to make sure, and I come across a self hard drive test. Great, I think, I’ll give that a shot. The estimated time is 70 minutes so I’ll go do something else. But it’s done in about 1 minute with a failure. Hmm.

Next I try to boot up with an Ubuntu live cd, which doesn’t work. It seems to be trying to read the hard drive and gets stuck in an endless loop. Super Grub Disk isn’t successful at fixing anything either. The laptop does, however, boot up with a DSL live cd. I try to look at the hard drive within DSL but it doesn’t seem to see it. Darn, it’s not looking good. Finally, I come to the painful realization that my hard drive died.

Then I send a support request to HP essentially telling them that my hard drive is dead and asking what my options are. A few hours later their reply is that my hard drive is dead and I need a new one. I look at the replacement hard drive in their shop and it’s a whopping $350 for 120 gigs. Damn, I can’t afford that. To cut things short, we exchange emails and come to the conclusion that without proof of purchase, my laptop is out of warranty, and I didn’t save the receipt.

Foolish, I know. I’ve realized that I’ve done a lot of foolish things, like not making any back ups, but I’ve never had problems of this magnitude before so cut me some slack. I’ve learned my lesson.

But the story isn’t over. There is light, though a little dim, at the end of the tunnel.

I contemplate getting an SD to IDE adapter so I can boot up from solid state, but that’s not a quick fix. I still might try it out, but I do have a spare USB hard drive lying around. I’ll put Linux on it! So I do and all is well. I think it even boots up a little quicker. I did lose everything on my hard drive, and my laptop isn’t so portable anymore, but at least it’s running and I didn’t have to shell out $350. After this experience, I’m going to try to move as much as I can to the web, and of course, backup regularly.

Thanks for reading.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 8:09 pm and is filed under misc and tagged with crash, dsl, grub, hard-drive, linux, usb, windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.