[ltp] Disasters on a Thinkpad 600E

[Susan Thomas]

Folks,

I have owned a Thinkpad 600E since December 1999. I run Debian Linux 2.2.14 
on it and very successfully too, till last Thursday, when all hell (literally!)
broke loose. 

I've been aware of the schizophrenia in the Thinkpad behaviour when it runs on 
battery and when it runs on power: /proc/cpuinfo shows 92MHz if it is booted 
on battery vs. 366MHz if it is booted on a direct power supply. 

On doomsday, it booted 92MHz while on power. There were two other glitches, 
both to do with the display: 

	- the thinkpad used only half the screen for display in textmode. 
        - an entire row of pixels at the top of the screen had died.

When I logged in and ran X, X used the full screen nicely (with a row of 
pixels dead). In fact, other than the /proc/cpuinfo, the machine behaved 
itself and very nicely too. It worked so nicely, I wasn't alarmed into 
taking a backup.

I took it to the IBM Thinkpad service center (in Bombay, India). They are 
not Linux aware, and all Linux machines make them jittery. At the service
center, they apparently opened up the machine and put in another CPU. They 
booted up the machine, and /proc/cpuinfo still showed 92MHz. They 
effectively washed their hands off the matter, and said they would get back
after consulting their Bangalore office. 

I went home, worked on the machine all night. I took it to office the next
morning, worked on it for two hours. It was working _so_ normally, I didn't
even consider taking a backup. I shut it down, went out for lunch, and took 
the machine with me. 

After lunch, I booted the machine to find "I9990301" was the only thing my 
machine would tell me after the Thinkpad opening screen with the memory 
check. 

I did the startup diagnostic test on the entire machine; everything checks
fine, except for hda1 which says "Dev 017 Err 022" and something else which
I forget. The hda1 test makes an awful (loud!) whirring sound in the middle
of the test. When I booted off a SuSE cdrom and tried to do a dd on the hard
disk, I can't read _anything_ off it, anywhere.  I got a friend's Thinkpad
600E, put my harddisk in, and the symptoms are the same: "I9990301" with 
startup diagnostic giving bad harddisk errors. 

I now have a dead (?) harddisk, and a weird /proc/cpuinfo and a screen that
doesn't display full size in textmode. Does anyone have any pearls of wisdom
on what they think might be the problem, what the possible solution could be,
what I could do, in what sequence (if only to know what not to do the next
time) to:

a) get the data off my dead harddisk
b) get a machine with a 366MHz CPU that the 600E is supposed to have
c) get a full screen display in textmode

I haven't sent email to any IBM folks outside of India yet. Which address
should I use if I wanted to send this email to IBM?  Are there any service
centers in Paris/Boston that might handle the problem of reviving my harddisk
with a higher degree of competence compared to what I've seen in Bombay? (I 
am likely to be in these places before the end of July.)

Other than the time taken off to type this, I'm keeping my fingers crossed
(desperately!) -- I've a month of very hard work done stored on my harddisk
that I am anxious to retrieve. 

Thanks,

	-Susan

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Susan Thomas                                 Work 91-22-840 0919 x550
Assistant Professor                          Fax  91-22-840-2752
                                                  susant@igidr.ac.in
Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research,
Gen. Vaidya Marg,
Goregaon (East), Bombay 400-065
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