[ltp] Re: R51 hard drive clicking & firmware

[Daniel Pittman]

On 22 Feb 2005, Gabriel M. Beddingfield wrote:
> When things get warmed up on my computer, the hard drive clicks. Not a loud
> click.  A quiet, consistent, "tikitikitiki."  My hard drive is a
> HTS548040M9AT00 (40GB), purchased new in October 2004.  As best as I
> remember, its always done it.  It usually stops momentarily when the disk
> is accessed.
>
> Hoping perhaps a firmware upgrade would help (after reading a few things
> over that past months).  So, I go to the IBM website to see if an upgrade
> in available.  It is.  Cool.  I just have to download about a dozen floppy
> disk images.
>
> PROBLEM:  I have no floppy drive.

If you can get at the disk images themselves, you can make a boot CD to
take the place of the floppy drive -- the BIOS emulates the floppy from
the boot image.

To get at the disk images I always used a Windows box and the rawwrite
tool that came on any Linux install CD, but I hear that you can extract
the images by treating the IBM .exe as a cab file with cabextract.

Once you have gotten the images, pass them to the '-b' argument to
mkisofs, so that it treats it as a boot image.  Then, boot off the
resulting CD.

Using a CD-RW is helpful here, since you otherwise waste a lot of CD-Rs. 

         Daniel

-- 
All discarded lovers should be given a second chance, but with somebody else.
        -- Mae West