May 12 2009
Failure time less than one month. Ouch!
On Saturday night I was googling something and the Firefox search bar refused to co-operate when I hit return. Nothing happened. At about the same time the automated updates running in the background seemed to hang or become similarly inactive. I didn’t see a connection betwen them at the time.
For some reason I next remember shutting the computer down (I don’t remember why any longer). This produced what was probably a kernel panic (I couldn’t really see what was happening because the screen was also strobing in a most unpleasant fashion. I had the laptop lid 3/4 closed and Helen said it looked like there was a lightning storm inside the computer.)
After a restart the computer didn’t get back on its feet. GRUB produced a number of different errors after each reboot but didn’t get very far. Booting from an Ubuntu install disc got me to the stage where I could query the system. The hard disc was completely inaccessible and produced huge quantities of I/O errors when it was being interrogated at startup.
Fearing the worst, I had a look at the BIOS. It said:
Hard Disk: None
Ah. I guess that explains things. My hard disk or the controller had given up the ghost. It was probably the disk because the internal CD/DVD drive was still working, and they probably share controllers.
I took the computer to John Lewis on Sunday afternoon and demonstrated the problem to their After Sales staff. They offered to order a direct replacement because they had none in stock, or I could take a wander to see if they had something else that would replace it just as well. I ended up with an HP Pavilion G60 laptop. It’s got a slightly more compact feel to it than the Toshiba. I hope the drive lasts longer though!