Waste of a good hard drive

[snousle]

It appears that the hard disk shipped with my HP TouchStupid (which has been nothing but trouble) has some serious problems of its own. Bad firmware, apparently, and the update they provided is in itself bricking disks pretty reliably. According to that site, "only drives which have not already locked up can be updated with the new firmware." Oh well. What a freaking waste. Perfectly good drive gone to hell. If anyone thinks they can restore it to function, it's yours.

Went out and paid $99 for an overpriced 500 GB Western Digital drive from the local Staples - the curse of living in a small town. Though it still stuns me that they are affordable at all. Hope it works.

Update: Yeah, it works. Never been so happy to see a computer actually boot again, I had figured it was going to be a total loss.

Comments

[p0lecat.livejournal.com]

The only good way to get a "Brick" to work is to hit is with a Brick! Or a pick at full swing is good too!

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Fortunately Bill offers a free "secure ballistic hard drive data destruction service", aka "target practice".

[p0lecat.livejournal.com]

Oooo! I have a 105 Cal cannon for that!

[dhpbear.livejournal.com]

I never thought I'd see the day where a 500 GB drive
would be overpriced at $100.00, until I saw a 2 TB drive for $90.00!

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Hope you didn't lose any important data when the drive bricked....

[snousle.livejournal.com]

The machine contained nothing irreplaceable, just a whole lot of music I'd ripped. I just use it for watching video and managing audio files - I'm just starting to get stuff on hard disks rather than on endless tapes and CDs.

But amazingly, I got it to boot into safe mode once and was able to back it all up before it wouldn't boot at all. That saved me a whole lot of time.

Seagate fucked up in a really big way on these drives, so badly I hear the support calls actually crashed their phone system. Of course they try to keep it all as hush hush as possible.

[bikerbaer.livejournal.com]

Firmware bricking hardware is the stuff I have nightmares about. It would be the complete end of my career if that happened on "my watch".

[danthered.livejournal.com]

Oy. Hope you have better luck with Western Digital hard drives than I have.

[truckerbear.livejournal.com]

Waving hand for bricked HD if you really want rid of it.