Volition

My Thinkpad T21's hard drive started giving me read and write errors earlier this week. This was cause for some concern as my notebook has all of my personal work on it. The source code for all of my projects, the source XML for my website, years and years of useful stuff that I've built, found, downloaded, scavenged, munged, used, listened to and watched.

Of course, none of it was backed up, and so if I lost it all I may as well have given up and become a shoe salesman. Luckily, the read errors were only on my /usr partition and so I managed to get a copy of everything on the /home partition. The day was saved, but my disk was still dying.

I called IBM and they told me to run this DFT tool of theirs (well, I guess it's Hitachi's now) and tell them what the diagnostic result code was. This was a pain as they only make it available as a floppy image. Hello? IBM? May I introduce you to CD-ROM. CD-ROM, this is IBM. Anyway, after a while I found the T21's floppy drive, after quite a while longer I found a floppy disk and wrote the image and ran the tool. It said my disk had bad sectors. Joy. So I call IBM back and they tell me to use DFT to "repair" the sectors (which it couldn't do because it doesn't support EXT3 filesystems) and everything will be fine. Sure.

In my experience, once a disk starts to get bad sectors, it keeps getting more bad sectors. I'm really unimpressed that thay didn't offer to replace the drive, because who's to say that more bad sectors won't start suddenly appearing in my home partition, destroying my years of work? As I said, I'm unimpressed with IBM.