Hard drive failure...

So Lynn's Sony VAIO laptop started failing S.M.A.R.T last week. I put in a rush order for a replacement drive on Newegg on Wednesday after spending a day or two backing up data from her laptop to mine and waiting on a response from Toshiba about whether they're able to replace the drive under their warranty or if I have to go through Sony.

After I got no response, I decided to just replace the drive myself. I really don't want to ship the laptop off to Sony and wait weeks for it to get sent back. My girlfriend in particular isn't too thrilled with that idea.

So Friday the new drive (a 320 GB Seagate Momentus) arrived. Yesterday morning, I attempted to clone the data on the Toshiba drive (250 GB btw) to the Seagate drive. Clonezilla refused to do this, stating that the drive was flagged for disk checking. Unfortunately, ChkDsk freezes when attempting to repair the drive. I tried cloning with Ghost, and while it allowed me to run the clone process, it froze not long after reporting the detection of a few bad sectors. Last night I fired up HDD Regenerator and began recovering the bad sectors. Frankly, I should probably have done it earlier; but this stuff ain't easy when you've got a 2-year-old running around.

So HDD Regenerator is about halfway done after approximately 12 hours. It's recovered 3 bad blocks on the Toshiba HDD. My girlfriend was frustrated last night about not having a laptop to use, so I burned an Ubuntu 10.04 CD and booted direct from CD. A little unnerving running an OS with a gaping hole in the bottom of the laptop where the HDD is supposed to be; it feels a little unnatural! In any case, by the time I'd burned the disc and come back to the bedroom, she was fast asleep. But hey, now she can use the laptop until I get her new drive cloned.

Hopefully once the drive is repaired, Ghost won't have any issues cloning the damaged drive. Once the damaged drive is copied over, I plan on pulling it apart and taking a look inside. I'll report back here on my progress. :)

UPDATE: After 24 hours of rebuilding data, I've given up. 12 hours has seen about another 1/6th of the data on the drive recovered, and even then, only about 2 out of 3 bad sectors are being successfully restored. I've copied the hidden Sony Recovery Volume to the new drive and I'm simply reinstalling from factory default that way. I've saved the most important data to my own laptop and I'll move it back after a clean install (once I've gotten rid of the Sony bloatware).

UPDATE 2: All went as planned. Killed all the VAIO crap bogging down startup and copied the important data back onto the drive. Lynn's happily using Windows once again. :)

1337 h4x in Ubuntu... I think?

So I've decided to play around with Linux some more. I've got an Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope dual boot on my retired desktop (retired since it doesn't handle a cable attack by a 2-year-old very well) but my laptop has just been running Windows 7.

Well I got bored the other day and decided to tinker around with it some more. Downloaded Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx yesterday and got it set up. Since I'm just tinkering, I went with the somewhat lame-o "installed within Windows" Wubi install. I'm not really looking for max performance, and I really didn't feel like repartitioning my hard drive, so give me a break. :-p

Once it was done installing, I rebooted, and selected the Ubuntu boot. One thing that always bugs me is that if you do the Wubi install, you have to go through 2 bootloaders, Windows and GRUB. I might just axe one of them later today. One thing that has always impressed me about Ubuntu is it's capability to run well "out of the box". Sure enough, everything was functioning great; I had my Google Talk and Gmail all configured and was connected to the wireless in minutes. I downloaded Chrome and began surfing the web, installing Adobe Flash 10.1 on the way.

Then I noticed one little problem; tap-to-click on my touchpad was enabled. Now, I understand a lot of people like this feature. I hate it. My hand rests on the touchpad in such a way that my thumb rests on the left mouse button. It doesn't take any more effort for me to click with my thumb, and sometimes I quickly touch the trackpad to move my cursor short distances, which often gets registered as a tap. Either way, I can't stand it.

How To: Cracking a boot-time Supervisor password on an IBM ThinkPad

I've been doing laptop repair for a while now, and most of what I end up doing is opening a laptop up and cleaning out a heatsink to prevent overheating problems.

I do run into a fair share of problems like DVD drives that won't close, power jacks that have come unsoldered, displays that have been cracked / have daiquiris dumped on them, (there is such a thing as partying too hard), keyboard replacement, etc.

But a few months back I had an interesting request: unlocking an older IBM ThinkPad that had a boot-time supervisor password preventing access.

Current Project: Multi-touch on my laptop touch-pad...

I'm trying to hack a set of neutered touch-pad drivers to support multi-touch again. If you're interested, read past the break...