[Thinkpad] X41T hdd

[Tim S.]

Hi all,

I've got an X41T with an ailing hard drive.  

Symptoms:
My wife calls me and tells me that she can't do anything in Windows.
Windows will crash before it's even done loading, the desktop blanks and
reloads.  Standard Explorer crash/reload.  No amount of rebooting helps.
This happened the day before finals, she still had to write the finals,
everything was on a non-functioning PC, and my sanity hinged on hers...

For some reason the first thought to me is the drive might be going, not a
problem with Windows.  No idea why.  So I do the Thinkvantage utilities on
boot thing and tell it to check everything.  Sure enough, a few ECC errors
appear for the drive (Hitachi HTC42606 60GB 4200rpm 1.8").

I couldn't figure out how to get it to do any types of repairs to the drive
(I'm guessing it doesn't?  How weak.) so I got into a command prompt safe
mode and managed to schedule a full chkdsk with repairs for the next boot.
Keeping with a theme, a few bad clusters were detected (and stated as
repaired) over a few files in c:\windows that looked like they were related
to the windowing portion of Windows.  Figures, eh?  At this point Windows OK
and as soon I opened anything related to viewing the file system, Explorer
would crash/reload.

Long story short, IBM support was enough to donate me a second identical
hard drive that fits the X41T.  I'd been using it as an external USB backup
drive, writing images to it via Acronis for a few months now.  It didn't
take much to bounce the image off my system, swap drives, re-image the drive
and she's right as rain again (well, her PC is at least :)  Interestingly
she says that it runs faster now, which is odd because it's only a day or
two removed backup so it's certainly not a clean install thing.

So now I've got this apparently hurting drive in the external case.  I'm
planning on calling IBM to see if they'll replace the drive under warranty
(three years, less than one into it) but I'm fretting the customs fees that
I'll have to pay if they ship it in.  I'll take care of that later.  

What I was wondering about was using this drive as a backup in the meantime
- I of course want to give it a through review.  I scanned it again with
chkdsk and it said it was fine (previous custers marked as bad were still
marked as bad), PC Doctor on my T60 scanned it and gave it four green passed
checkmarks.  I'm downloading the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test now and plan on
running that.

Is there anything else I should throw against it to make sure this thing is
OK for now?  

I'd like to make reasonably sure that I can use it at least temporarily as a
backup...

Thanks

Tim

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Orthodoxy means not thinking, not needing to think.
Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Orwell, 1984