Tragedy, Happiness, Dell, and Ubuntu

Thanksgiving weekend has been an interesting few days. We headed down to my parent's house for a family Thanksgiving. After the eating, my wife and I headed back to my parent's house from my aunt's since Logan was extremely worn out. He went to sleep, and I pulled out my laptop.

I knew something was wrong as soon as I hit the power button and the hard drive started clicking like mad. The laptop then decided to tell me that there were no bootable devices and to run the diagnostic tools. I did, and then it told me there was no hard drive detected. Not a good thing. I pull the drive out, reseat it, and the same thing. Horrible clicking followed by the same error.

I had a copy of Spinrite (which I highly recommend for anyone) in my laptop bag from work and booted off of that. I tried to select the drive, which it recognized, and it said that there appeared to be a problem. When I tried to actually start the Sprinrite process, it refused. My drive was in such bad shape that Sprinrite actually told me it wouldn't run. Not good at all.

This is the one machine I have that doesn't get backed up.

I grab my dad's laptop and head to Dell's website. I log on with the chat, give him the service tag. I explain my problem and what I've done. Without any other questions, he asks for my address and says that a drive will be at work by Monday. No hassle, no going through their magical checklist to reaffirm that my drive is dead. The chat lasted less than 10 minutes, most of it confirming address and contact information.

That still left me without a laptop to use until Monday. I had my external hard drive, an Ubuntu 7.10 CD, and a laptop that boots off of USB. Plugged in the first, stuck in the second, and told the laptop to boot from the third.

After a few moments, Ubuntu booted and recognized my external drive. I started the installer, told it to wipe my external drive clean, and after about 20 minutes it was finished. I rebooted... and had a desktop! Ubuntu had detected all my hardware just like it had the last time it was installed, and even playing OpenArena I can't tell that I'm running off of a USB drive.

Most of today has been installing little bits of software, but at least I have a laptop. The battery even lasts about two hours even with having to power the external drive. Tragedy averted? Not really, I lost a demo I had set up in VMWare and will get to figure out how to set it up and see how dead the internal drive is Monday, but at least I have a fully functional laptop.

At least it's working.