new life for the laptop

Thursday, November 04, 2004, at 10:59AM

By Eric Richardson

On Tuesday afternoon I ordered a new laptop hard drive to replace my ailing one. That turned out to be a good move, as my loveable drive quickly turned from correctable drive ticks to a mindset where it would hit something it didn't like and lockup solid.

Here's why I love CDW: I ordered the new drive Tuesday afternoon, probably around 3pm PST. CDW's in Illinois, so that's 5pm or so for them. This morning my drive arrived. It shipped from Iowa yesterday morning and made it to my door 24 hours later. And that was with the cheap shipping (which ended up being UPS 2-day Air... $13 or so).

I never understood how small laptop hard drives were until today. These things are tiny. A credit card almost covers the entire surface of one.

My installation procedure is pretty much down to a science. From the blank drive I restored Windows XP using the Toshiba rescue DVD. That's just a ghost image that throws the factory default installation onto the drive. Then I booted into a Knoppix cd and used qtparted to resize the Windows partition down to 12gig or so. Then I booted the Debian netinstall cd, and Debian's currently downloading and installing.

Hopefully this will bring some closure to my laptop and drive issues.

Eric Richardson lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he works on payments infrastructure for Cash App.

Past lives involved streaming audio for Southern California Public Radio, running a hyperlocal news site for Downtown Los Angeles, working on custom mapping code, and writing Perl at the Jet Propulsion Labratory.

Previously on this date...

2009
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