All content copyright © 2004-2010 by steve hardyFor weeks, our browser/email box had been emitting ominous noises. (The box is a venerable thinkpad laptop, with broken internal display, that drives an external sony hd monitor.) I attributed the noises to a dying power supply fan, and I backed up everything I thought was important, with intent to continue using the box until its fan died completely. I was putting off the impending maintenance headache as long as possible.
Last week the box died with a Windows blue screen indicating "unmountable boot volume". I tried some of the usual windows tricks to revive the failed disk. (Windows recovery mode, rewrite boot sector, etc) No joy. Drive not mountable. The broken harddrive was proving more troublesome than the expected fan failure. I had a smaller drive in another non working box. So I decided to switch over to linux by installing it on that smaller drive. I did so, and in relatively short order, the box was again set up for browsing and email. But the video output to the sony monitor looked awful. The linux driver could not be convinced to use the entire screen, and to add insult to injury, the right side of the display was cut off. The ouput left the outer 20% of the display area unused, but on a maximized window, the scrollbar at the right side was missing. A quick search online revealed that this was a known and unresolved issue with the linux support for that ati video version.
I lived with the video limitations for a few days, but the other local users of the computer were decidedly less accepting. And meanwhile, I was discovering which files I had neglected to back up from the old failed drive.
So I took another run at recovering the broken drive. Amongst all the usual bogus online advice was a guy dealing with the same set of symptoms. He went through the same diagnostics as me before arriving at the final, obvious (in hindsight) step of running chkdsk. So I ran chkdsk, which grinded away for over five hours. before reporting that it had fixed some errors. After rebooting, Windows was back. Without the ominous noise. I quickly backed up all the files I wanted to preserve, and have continued to use it for a couple days now without incident. Am now returned to "wait til it dies" mode.
posted at: 13:51 | path: | permanent link to this entry
All content copyright © 2004-2010 by steve hardy