2007-12-21 #1

Disk failure

Hard disk failed either Sunday night or Monday morning. The computer was left running over the weekend in the dock at home, and Monday morning it was displaying a blue screen indicating a memory allocation error of some kind. I just packed it up and got to my first stop of the day where I discovered that the computer would not boot. It would POST, then sit there with a flashing cursor.

Running the diagnostics showed no errors, although if you ran the diagnostics then tried to reboot, the computer would complain that the hard disk was not detectable. Running a linux liveCD resulted in the kernel complaining that the disk was giving invalid return codes.

Called Dell, got a disk sent to me.

Reinstalled everything.

This time I did it myself in order to learn about the process.

Took four tries to install the OS, before I discovered that the OS would not install if the disk was in in AHCI mode, only if it was in ATA mode. Pity. Vista is supposed to support AHCI out of the box.

Spent the rest of the week putting things back together. Nothing really new.