Wednesday, 05 April 2006

My laptop has developed a bung hard drive. After a couple of days of rest, it managed to boot again, but I don't trust it, and have (after much angst) managed to convince Dell to send me a new hard drive.

I was initially going to try and borrow a 2.5" SATA USB hard drive enclosure from somewhere to attempt to rescue the data off the disk, but I thought to myself, why bother, when I can just boot off a live CD and skip mucking around?

So here I am, writing this post SSHed from the 5.10 live CD, and it Just Works^tm. I'm quite impressed. It dealt with the SATA hard drive. It dealt with the SATA CD-ROM. It dealt with the wireless (albeit it associated with the wrong access point), and it dealt with the video. It took a little while to boot, but not as long as the SuSE live CD I once experimented with. Overall, very slick. Nice job guys. Now if I can just rescue my data...

Despite my dramas on Monday night with Dell USA, and I think thanks to the (much better) Dell APAC, I had my change of ownership expedited, and received an email today that it had been completed. So I again grappled with the abomination that is the US Dell support line. I might add that I could not find the number I called anywhere from http://support.dell.com, and had to rely on the dialled number history in my phone to call them again.

I'd like to think that half of my customer service experience improvement was because I only spoke to someone in India once. They were able to pull up my laptop's service tag now, and transferred me off somewhere else. Except that wasn't the right place, and so they transferred me again. To the wrong place. At least the second person I was transferred to was able to see that I'd already been transferred twice, and used some special phone system secret powers to transfer me to the right place at last.

I didn't even have to put up too much of a fight to convince them to ship me a new drive. When I told the lady on the phone that I'd run the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test and it'd failed the disk, and that it had been making nasty clicking sounds before that, she agreed to send out a replacement. Hopefully it'll arrive on Friday.