As soon as I received my R3240 in June, 2005 I reformatted the hard drive and put Linux on it. I tried several distros, but quickly settled on Ubuntu Hoary amd-64. I am currently running Dapper amd-64. This computer is my first foray into Linux and I am not a computer science major, so consider that I am still pretty much a newbie.
During the first year or so I experienced occasional corruption of the main partition. Luckily I was always able to recover unscathed with fsck. Nevertheless, the continuous corruption was disturbing. Eventually I came to blame the ext3 filesystem. Then, several months ago, I decided to upgrade the 60 GB 4200 rpm hard drive that came in the computer to an 80 GB 7200 rpm drive. I didn't really need the space; I was just after speed. After the successful upgrade I continued to experience corruption. At this point I became convinced that ext3 had a bug somewhere. After all, it happened on the original hard drive and again on a brand new replacement drive. What else could it be? So yesterday I whipped my R3240 out of my backpack at the university and turned it on. The Compaq splash screen came up, but that was all. No grub menu. Nothing. It just sat there. Of course, I had a presentation due in four hours and it was all on this computer. Why do these things always happen when you can't afford for them to happen? I recall my father referring to this kind of situation as "the perversity of inanimate matter." In desperation I went to the university CompSci department where they have a help desk for Linux users. The help desk person said "it appears it is not finding your hard drive." Well, duh! That made sense. Why didn't I figure that out? Since I knew how to get at the hard drive compartment, we rummaged around the help desk area and found a small phillips head screwdriver, and then reseated the hard drive, whereupon grub came up and the computer booted normally. (Whew!!!) That was yesterday. Since then it has happened twice more. I now carry a small screwdriver in my backpack. I note that the problem only occurs after walking with the computer in my backpack, where it slaps against my back with each step. The backpack is padded, but it is also full of books and stuff. Evidently this is enough jostling to unseat the hard drive. I think I need a new something-or-another. Since it happened with the original hard drive as well, I am supposing that the problem is in the connector on the computer, not the connector on the hard drives. I have the Maintenance and Service Guide, but it does not show exactly where the connector goes or what its part number is. So has anyone run into this problem before? Does anyone know if there is a replacement connector available, or what its part number is? Or where it connects? Or how to replace it? Or does anyone have any other suggestions? _______________________________________________ LinuxR3000 mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pcxperience.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxr3000 Wiki at http://prinsig.se/weekee/
