That lovely new computer I bought a year ago...? Its hard drive died a slow and painful death after just 11 months (grrr)   Errors apparently undetectable by Dell diagnostic software that might have got it changed for free under warranty...

First signs of impending badness: odd segfaults, mostly with apt.  Then my filesystem started randomly going read only, with system logs showing a lot of I/O errors and problems with the journalling.  hmm.  To start with, nothing a reboot and quick forced fsck wouldn't fix.

But then it obviously got worse, and any 'repairs' lasted all of 2 minutes before yet more errors sprang up   I'm getting quite good at intensive fscking from a live CD now though! Even tried reformatting and reinstalling, but that took about 4 attempts because it kept crashing with filesystem errors.  bah!

So I gave up, and ordered a new hard drive. And a new stick of memory, to upgrade it to a nice even 4Gb (and make my order qualify for free saver delivery)

And as if that wasn't bad enough, my TV died.

Well, the freeview box did anyway.  But a CRT TV is somewhat useless without one of those now.  Some pondering later, I decided to just buy a new telly rather than just spend £20 on a new freeview box.

Added that on to the existing order, paid for next day (I was getting bored and impatient!), then got annoyed when it failed to turn up last Friday as expected.  Ebuyer support not entirely helpful there, but they claim they've refunded the next-day surcharge so we shall see.

Finally, nearly two weeks after initially ordering the HDD, it all arrived on Monday.  New gadget excitement!

So now I give you... "Katy's guide to hard drive replacement in a stupidly small form factor PC":

1. remove purple case top, easy peasy!
2. fail to unscrew the top inner layer due to shitty screwdrivers.  completely shred one whilst forcibly removing it.  swear lots
3. realise shit screwdrivers aren't going to reach the rest of the screws anyway
4. go to B&Q to buy new screwdrivers
5. swap dead disk for functioning new one
6. replace most of the screws, apart from one that's far too fiddly on the drive caddy, and the broken one from the top bit

next up, the RAM upgrade:

1. when ordering, completely forget that there are two sizes of memory: PC and Laptop
2. get pissed off upon realising that desktop machine uses laptop RAM
3. send memory back for a refund

So, half successful! The new telly's good too, plays DVDs and everything.  Also has a USB port which I'm yet to investigate, but apparently I can record things.  oooh.

tags: gadgets geeky linux