Kirk's replacement hard drive arrived yesterday and he has restored his computer as a linux machine and is happily plugging away.
The reason I am blogging this is that not many people know about getting their hard drive replaced under warranty. If your hard drive goes out during the say 3 years of its warranty, you can, for the cost of shipping it back to the manufacturer, get a replacement, frequently a larger and faster drive than the original.
When most people have a hard drive failure, they simply go to the computer store and buy a replacement, or their computer repair guy does. But when Kirk was working for a computer repair service some years ago in Atlanta, we discovered that most hard drives have pretty extensive, full replacement warranties. He even found that in one case the warranty had expired but if a $20 upgrade fee was paid the manufacturer would replace the now dead and out of warranty drive with a newer, faster, larger one. Since then, every time a hard drive has crashed we have gotten a replacement.
At first, because we needed the first replacement in a hurry, we bought another for quick installation, but then we got the dead one replaced under warranty and installed it as a secondary drive. Now, years later, each of our machines has at least 2 hard drives, some 3 or 4 and when a drive goes out, it can be temporarily replaced with one of the others until the warranty unit comes.
I hope this is as exciting to somebody as it was to me.
Posted by apopheniac at October 1, 2004 11:23 AM