Either my laptop is possessed or it really hates me.

Have you tried booting from a live Linux CD?

Do you have any other spare hard drives you can try to run the installation on?

Congratulations, it's a Christmas miracle! I didn't think to have you run memtest which most likely would have identified a problem with your RAM. Oh well. Glad it's working!

Edit: Wasn't Christmas when you got it working... oops

Re the possible 8Gb upgrade: Only do it if you have 64bit windows, as 32bit versions can't address beyond about 3.5Gb (which is why so many laptops were sold with 3Gb) It's a Microsoft limitation, as the processor should support PAE (Physical Address Extensions). 32 bit Linux can definitely see and use 8 Gb.

I think it was both possessed and hated you. cguru:




IMHO, definitely put money towards new tech :thumbup: Laptops have made some good gains in the last few years.

I've never met a Toshiba laptop that worked properly.

a lot of trouble to go through just because you trusted some piece of software that thinks its psychic and somehow 'knows' your hard drive is failing. listen, a hard drive either fails NOW or it doesn't. the only time i know a hard drive is really failing is when they make odd noises (aka click of death, noisy bearings, or hard spin-up). if a hard drive is quiet, and operating normally, forger SMART or any of that jazz that just exists to sell hard drives to people gullible enough to believe it

Glad to hear you device is back up and running. I have heard good things about the Win8 touchscreen tabs and/lappys.

I am running Win8 right now and it is pretty decent. Takes some time to get used to, especially since i use Microsoft for nothing...

nickdalzell said:

a lot of trouble to go through just because you trusted some piece of software that thinks its psychic and somehow 'knows' your hard drive is failing. listen, a hard drive either fails NOW or it doesn't. the only time i know a hard drive is really failing is when they make odd noises (aka click of death, noisy bearings, or hard spin-up). if a hard drive is quiet, and operating normally, forger SMART or any of that jazz that just exists to sell hard drives to people gullible enough to believe it

Click to expand...

I beg to differ. S.M.A.R.T. is not only legitimate, it's a very useful extension to the ATA and SCSI interfaces. When I was in corporate IT we used it to monitor every HD in our data centers, hardware willing. We also used it to a lesser extent (but in a larger scale, thousands of drives) on the desktop computers that had enterprise management software running on them. Right now my home NAS box is keeping close watch on the four drives in it, and I can see the progress of them failing (I kicked over the NAS box while it was running ) sector by sector. This is quite useful to me!

Like it or not, you must trust the "software" (actually it's the firmware inside the drives themselves) that supplies a virtual CHS and/or LBA interface to the (S)ATA, SAS or parallel SCSI interface (still found in some data centers). Even before S.M.A.R.T., modern ATA and SCSI drive firmware managed physical disk allocation structures that were far more complex than the legacy CHS numbering scheme indicates. And on most drives there was a spare cylinder (or two) on the drive that was used to replace bad physical sectors with good ones on the "spare" track(s). This was (and still is) completely invisible to the computer user, even when using the excellent SpinRite software that pastafarian mentioned. Call it what you like, but it really does work!

BTW, the Click of Death was something that affected Iomega brand 100MB floppy drives that were popular in the mid to late 1990s. Newer fixed disk hard drives (not to be confused with removable media hard drives that have been in use since the "Winchester" IBM mainframe drives in the 1960s) can make clicking sounds that are more audible now mostly because drives are getting quieter. This is NOT a click of death; it's a perfectly normal recalibration process that in now necessary for the microscopic tracks on the gigabyte and terabyte drives to read and write data reliably. Yes, this can put the drive "on hold" for a little while, especially with external USB drives IME. If it's a problem, people can buy multimedia (or "A/V") HDs that are made to be more responsive for use in DVRs and other applications.

I hope you don't take offense. My only intention here is to spread the correct information and to debunk myths that help nobody. Nothing personal.

I do believe the IBM DeskStar line of HDs had their own version of the "Click of death" -- this is where I first heard the term. It was the beginning of the end of them in the HD business before they spun everything off the Lenovo. But man that's an interesting story -- never knew that term started with IOmega. I used to think Zip and Jazz drives were gonna be the future. But they seemed to mess that up badly heh.


I agree though, S.M.A.R.T. can be helpful. I keep an eye on it for my NAS especially.

alostpacket said:

I do believe the IBM DeskStar line of HDs had their own version of the "Click of death" -- this is where I first heard the term. It was the beginning of the end of them in the HD business before they spun everything off the Lenovo. But man that's an interesting story -- never knew that term started with IOmega. I used to think Zip and Jazz drives were gonna be the future. But they seemed to mess that up badly heh.

Click to expand...

IBM isn't out of the mainframe computer business, or the software business. IBM divested themselves of the consumer PC part of the business, which is understandable. Ever since Compaq made the first PC clone, IBM's share of that market has dwindled. The Deskstar (which is now owned by Hitachi, not Lenovo) problem may have been called "click of death" in error, out of ignorance. This may be due to the use of the name "Deathstar" because it has "death" in it.

I agree though, S.M.A.R.T. can be helpful. I keep an eye on it for my NAS especially.

Click to expand...

Yup. It's there, no extra charge. Might as well take advantage of it. I still try to run my hardware into the ground, which is easy to recover from with a RAID 5 array. These days my #1 HD problem is that I have a growing collection of drives that have nothing wrong with them other than having not enough capacity for my needs.

pastafarian said:

Got everything working, then the touchpad went wonky. It randomly goes crazy making the pointer fly all over the screen. Though it's supposed to be defeatable via software or a function key, that's not so anymore. Add to that that the only way to get a usb mouse to function is to remove the synaptics touch pad driver. This also removes the touchpad wrist protection making typing a real chore. I wanted to wait for a touch screen pc, but this is all but unbearable now. With the insistence by the wife, we bought this-

IdeaPad Y400 Laptop - 95232FU - Dusk Black: Doorbuster | Lenovo | (US)

No touch screen, but a significant upgrade in power. She gets video editing capability, my son and I get gaming.

Click to expand...

Nice lil lappy IMHO.

Quad Core i7 Ivy, discreet graphics, 8GB 1600Mhz RAM.... everything a growing droid needs.

Possessed

all i know is there are a lot of people on many forums saying that S.M.A.R.T. had claimed their drives were 'imminent failure predicted' but they boot and run just fine...

S.M.A.R.T. reminds me of the Check Engine lamp in my car. sure, it can mean problems ahead, but many people drive with the Check Engine lit and the car or truck runs just fine--mine included

pastafarian said:

In this case, smart wasn't reporting anything. It stopped functioning. The drive was also showing other issues, the worst being extremely slow performance. And yes, I checked the drive for fragmentation. I've trusted Steve Gibson ever since I met him years ago. When his Spinrite program says the drives not redeemable, I believe it!

Click to expand...

It sure looks like your HD is a write-off. If stuff like S.M.A.R.T. aren't working, the controller board on the drive is probably in the process of dying. The drive electronics is the point of failure surprisingly often. Constantly shrinking circuitry is great on the digital end, but not so good for the analog circuits that controls the R/W heads.