Last week the 32g drive in my aging Dell Inspiron 5000e died on me. I had had some strange errors and thought it might help to rebuild my kernel. Then it started coughing on loading kernel modules during boot up. I was thinking what the f***. In the end the annoying knocking sound that has accompanied the drive got more and more intense and I realized that it was finally dying.

Neither MultiMax nor Panafoto could help me out, prefering instead to try and sell me keychain flash drives, which I patiently told them was not what I needed.

So Saturday I mounted a taxi to take me to my favorite pc store in town. Planet Computer in the suburb of Eldorado between Felix Maduro and Sol de la India (if you’re in town and need components quick). I got a 40G fujitsu drive for $167, which I didnt think was really too bad at all. As usual the Chinese owner allowed me to haggle and gave me good insights into various info.

I also got an external USB2 harddrive enclosure which doesnt actually fit my old drive, but thats what screwdrivers are for anyway. I managed to save my entire home directory thank good, even though it was screeching like you wouldnt belive, while it was copying it.

So since Saturday, my notebook has been building Gentoo with Linux 2.6.1 and KDE 3.2rc1, hopefully tomorrow it should be ready. Living on the bleeding edge as usual I have had a spat of strange build errors slowing it down, but hey it looks like its cooking now.

BTW, to get started I used an old Cluster Knoppix bootable live cd that I had lying around, which is the coolest thing in the world for demonstrating cheap linux clustering.