In late May, the hard drive in my Thinkpad failed. So, I ran out and immediately bought a slightly smaller drive, and started copying data around and so on. The old drive could still be used, just only for about 20 minutes at a time, then it would overheat and stop working.
I sent it in for repair, and it reached Toshiba on June 3rd.
On June 17th or so, I called them to ask what was taking so long. They explained it could take 10-30 days to repair the drive. (This is a $200 part. If it takes more than a couple of days to repair, it’s not even remotely cost-effective to do so.) Anyway, time passed. And passed. On July 7th, I called again.
Turns out that, as expected, they’re replacing the drive. The thing is, though, I have an HDD2183A, and all they have on the shelf is a HDD2183C. So, they were gonna wait in case an HDD2183A showed up. They did not call. They didn’t ask. They just figured they’d wait - probably forever, since apparently the HDD2183A is a model rev they sell in Japan, or something. So they finally admitted that they could send me the functionally identical US-model drive. So now I have it.
Enter the nightmare. NetBSD’s FireWire support appears to be almost-stable-but-not-quite. The external drive bay I got a while back that’s supposed to do high-speed USB 2.0 doesn’t seem to, and it also does FireWire, but the system panics if I try to use that for too long.
So I finally move the “old” laptop drive (the one I got in late May) into another machine so I can move files over the network. Only to discover that, about 10GB in, it appears to be able to crash the other machine too.
So now I’m sitting around copying backups in at a lousy couple of megabytes a second, which will take something like 15 hours total.
And I’m BORED.
Once that’s all done, it gets fun. See, once that’s done, I get to start trying to recussitate the Windows partitions. The system used System Commander as its boot-selector of choice, so I need to re-run that to “bless” the partitions correctly - currently, if I set one of the Windows partitions as active, the machine just won’t boot. If/when I get that done, I can then see how many reboots it takes to catch up on security updates for XP; I’m guessing five or six.
This is annoying. In retrospect, I wish I’d spent the extra money to mail-order an 80GB drive, and then I would have only had to copy everything once.