On Thursday, I got my laptop back from HP and was impressed with the speed of the transaction. It seemed like it was taking HP a little longer than it should have to get things moving, but once things were in motion, it was a pretty swift operation.

I fired up the laptop and did some typing on the new keyboard. Very nice. I should accidentally crack a lifter/lever thingie every nine months until the warranty wears out!

After using the laptop for three or four hours, however, it froze up. I had to power cycle the laptop to get it to do anything. When it tried to boot into Linux, it stopped shortly after beginning to load the kernel and spat out a message about a sector read error.

I rebooted a couple times with the same result.

I booted off a rescue CD thinking maybe the problem was a corrupt root filesystem and I’d have to run a fsck off the CD media. The rescue disk program couldn’t find any Linux installation on my hard drive. When I flipped over to the virtual terminal where the log messages were being written, there were all kinds of disk error messages being written out.

I rebooted and went into the BIOS and ran the BIOS disk tests. Both tests failed.

I had a dead hard disk.

On Friday, I contacted HP support and they said they’d send me a new hard drive as soon as someone could call me and get a credit card number from me as security until I ship the old drive back. I’m guessing that will be on Monday.

In the meantime, I dug around in my basement and found the 15GB drive I bought for my old laptop a few months before it died for good. I put it in my HP and installed Fedora Core 3 on it so I’ll have something to use until I get the replacement drive.