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AnchorDesk

David Coursey
How I escaped from hard-drive hell (again)

David Coursey
Executive Editor, AnchorDesk
Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2004
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Regular readers of this column know--or should know--that when the going gets tough, I call Big Ernie. Not the deity of the same name that some smoke-jumpers credit as their patron saint and protector, but Ernie Mariette, my personal patron saint and protector of my various computers and gizmos. I periodically share these stories to remind you a) what a technical bozo I can be and b) that personal computers are still way too complex.

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MY MOST RECENT call to Big Ernie (who really isn't all that big, but the nickname makes for a better story) came just last week. I have a three-year-old Compaq Armada M700 laptop that I like very much--so much so that, when I'm working in the den, sitting in the big chair next to the fish tank and across from the TV, it's the machine I usually choose. Though designed for Windows 2000, the Armada worked fine with Windows XP.

At least it did until a few days ago, when the drive started going south. It was having trouble reading data, tended to hang the computer, and didn't like to write files the first or second time I told it to. The drive was also getting waaaaay too small for me--13GB, which seemed like the universe when the machine first arrived in my life.

When it started misbehaving, that was all the incentive I needed to run down to CompUSA and buy a new 40GB drive. I wanted to go even bigger than that, actually, but the guy behind the service counter warned me that anything larger might not work properly.

I drove home, grabbed the Torx set, opened up the Compaq, and removed the old drive. Installing the new one and buttoning up the machine took a few minutes, the whole job less than half an hour.

SO FAR SO GOOD. I turned on the machine with a Windows XP Pro set-up disk in the CD drive and things continued swimmingly. I formatted the hard drive and started the XP installation process. That's when things started going to hell.

Windows XP wouldn't install. The set-up program started writing files to the new drive, then suddenly just stopped. Error messages popped up, and--despite my attempts to solve the problem by opening the drive, cleaning the disk, swapping one set-up disk for another, blowing out the drive itself with a can of compressed "air," chanting mystical incantations, and outright swearing--the OS wouldn't install.

My Linux friends would consider this a sign from an angry anti-Microsoft God that I should repent and change operating systems. But after futzing around for about four hours and finally getting to the point where the machine would not quite run set-up from the new drive without crashing, I called Big Ernie.

I told him my tale of woe; he listened. I could swear I heard him nodding over the phone. By this time I was fairly convinced that it was the CD-ROM drive that was unable to read data properly and was causing my troubles.

"So what kind of a hard drive did they sell you?" Big Ernie asked.

I grabbed the paperwork and responded, "Toshiba."

"Oh," Big Ernie replied, underwhelmed, "don't you know Toshiba drives sometimes don't work with Compaq computers?"

No, I didn't know that. Neither did the senior tech at the store where I returned the drive, who swore that Toshibas are the only drives the store sells, and that he installs them all the time with no problems.

As best I can tell, this incompatibility between Compaq hardware and Toshiba hard drives is something between an urban legend and accepted fact. Big Ernie has run into it before and the phenomena fits with Compaq's unfortunate penchant for proprietary-ness.

All I know for sure is that, when we put a 3GB IBM drive (salvaged from a Mac) into the Compaq, everything worked fine. (The original drive had been an IBM.) The CD drive still seemed a little flaky, but that was resolved by using a different XP disc.

I WANT TO order a larger IBM drive for the Armada, as well as some memory, since we discovered it was running on only 256MB of RAM. But Big Ernie thinks the machine is ready to become a hand-me-down.

However, I'm not ready to drop something north of $1,500 on a new laptop, so I'll probably just use borrowed hardware until I decide what to do. This column, for example, is being written on a Fujitsu T-Series Lifebook Tablet PC.

This is a nice-enough convertible tablet. I like it more than the Acer I've used previously, though I understand Acer has ironed out some of its issues in newer machines. The Fujitsu's built-in 802.11b has been flakey--disconnecting and reconnecting for no obvious reason. It also lacks a real serial port, which is something I still need from time to time. (No, I don't like having to carry around a USB-to-serial port adapter.)

I'm hoping to use the Fujitsu enough that I'll make regular use of the tablet features; I haven't done so yet.

The other machine I'll be using--my all-around favorite laptop right now--is the new 15-inch G4 PowerBook. This is one of the sweetest computers I've used in a long time; now that I finally have Entourage (the MacOffice Outlook replacement) connecting to my Exchange Server, I'll probably be using it more.

This great computer will probably spoil me. The biggest problem I'm facing is retrieving it from the family member who's been using it.

Still, I miss the Armada. We've done a lot of good work together and it's worth saving, I think, even if it's just to pass along to someone else. With Big Ernie's help, I can probably get it working. But who'd have thought a Toshiba drive...

What do you think? Have you ever had a drive go south on you? How hard was it to fix? Tell me about your worst hardware experience. TalkBack to me below! 

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