June 2006

So the nice 120-GB drive that I installed a back in February has started clicking. This is a bad thing. It probably means that the drive head is snapping to one extent or the other of its travel distance. If it happens enough, the drive will permanently fail. As it is, it's sometimes enough of an error that my laptop will stop recognizing the drive altogether, and I get the nice "no hard drive detected" logo when I reboot.

Needless to say, I am not pleased with this situation.

Luckily, WD has already approved my RMA, and is shipping me an advance replacement. New drive should be here in a week or so (I estimate), and I'll buy a UPS Ground label (about 6 bucks) and ship the bad drive back to them. I'll be doing a full random-wipe before I ship it, of course.

There are two irritating parts about all of this.

First (and, I think, the more time-consuming of the two), I need to do a full backup of the old drive, and restore onto the new one. Hopefully this won't be too bad; I should be able to do it all without too much heartache. The bad part is just waiting for the stupid backup to finish; last time I tried, it ran for about 5 hours before I killed it (and came to work). I think I'll start the new backup when I get home in this morning, and then do a "catch-up" run when the new drive arrives. Of course, the alternative is to just wait until the drive arrives, then hook it up in the USB enclosure and do the backup straight to that drive instead of using an interim device. Yeah, that's a great idea. I'll obviously still be doing a full backup anyway onto the other 120 that I've got in the enclosure right now, but I like this other idea; it'll save me boatloads of headache.

Oh, yeah: second - I have to open my laptop again. And since I don't have a MacBook, it means about 40 bazillion tiny screws and other pieces instead of just 4 screws and a small memory shield. But this is relatively inexpensive (I just have to pay for return shipping), so I'm willing to accept the hassle. Besides, it's not like I haven't done it several times before:

1. I installed the new hard drive
2. When installing the new HD, I forgot to reconnect the mouse. Took laptop apart again to fix that.
3. I installed the new bluetooth module
4. I installed the new SuperDrive
5. When installing the new SuperDrive, I again forgot to reconnect the mouse cable. Grr.

So this will only make the sixth time I've had to open it up, and this time I actually have a "black stick" (it arrived the day after the SuperDrive did).