[ltp] Warning -- Windows can hose your machine!

[D. Sen]

"Only windows is supported on a machine that came preloaded with windows"

This is concerning and annoying. Recently, my hard drive started emitting loud
clicking noises along with a number of "hda.." notices on the syslog. It was
obviously on its way out. When I called IBM support they basically said that
unless I could prove using DOS/Windows diagnostic tools that the drive was
faulty they wouldnt do anything about it (since the machine came preloaded with
windows). The diagnostic tool that came preloaded with windows failed to find a
problem. Another tool that they recommended crashed prematurely (without
producing any diagnostic data). After about the fourth call to support,
I finally managed to convince them that the second program should not be
crashing if the hard-drive was fine (I happened to have an older thinkpad with
two hard disks where the program .

Its a cause for concern when hardware is obviously faulty from all
indications......especially SysLog error messages, but IBM support ignores them
all unless errors show up under windows.

I cant tell you how frustrating it was when told that either the problem would
have to show up under windows or the drive fail completely before they paid any
heed to my complaints. Even more bewildering since they sell another member of
the family of thinkpads (T21) preloaded with Caldera Linux.

DS

Tom Grydeland wrote:

> On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, Ben Snyder wrote:
>
> > Sorry, I meant the drive (was bad).  Any disc, especially data discs, will
> > spin only a couple revs before stopping, then Linux spews error messages.
>
> This doesn't happen for *all* CDs though.
>
> Any ideas how I can isolate this error -- determine whether the drive is
> to blame or not?  As I said, the drive claims to be OK in the self-test.
>
> >  - devlyn76
>
> --
> //Tom Grydeland <Tom.Grydeland@phys.uit.no>
>
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--
D. Sen, Room E167
AT&T Labs-Research
Shannon Laboratory
180 Park Ave.
Florham Park NJ 07932-0971
Ph: 973-360-8546
http://www.research.att.com/~dsen



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