Why pull punches. The disk drive in Steffie’s laptop is nearly dead and will be replaced. CHKDSK ran for over 12 hours, correcting nearly 8,000 clusters and shedding 8 Gb in capacity. Even then, the laptop was ‘challenged.’
This morning, I went to Dell for tech support. This laptop is protected against everything for three years. The father of a college student is prudent.
I chose to chat with Dell because I am comfortable conveying technical info via the keyboard. And, I wanted Dell’s operator on my side. I was as nice as I could be.
All things considered, my chat request was probably taken in India. In the past I’ve asked where the call was being answered and the support tech was always forthcoming.
It is obvious from my conversation that there are differences between the English I speak and the English Gunjan speaks. When I was confused, I asked. He did the same. We never strayed too far from understanding each other.
The transcript of my chat is attached below.
Steffie will receive the new drive at school and install it herself. In a laptop, installing a hard drive isn’t much more difficult than plugging in a light. I have confidence she’ll be able to handle it (if she can find a Phillips head screwdriver).
Should a drive die this soon – only about a year and a half after purchase? Of course not, but stuff happens.
The bottom line is, within a few days, this will all be resolved and resolved to our satisfaction.
Agent (Gunjan_143463): “Thank you for contacting Dell Technical Support. My name is Gunjan and my rep ID number is 143463. How may I assist you today?”
03/11/2007 10:18:08AM Geoff Fox: “This is my daughter’s laptop”
03/11/2007 10:18:17AM Geoff Fox: “I am technically proficient”
03/11/2007 10:18:19AM Agent (Gunjan_143463): “Thank you for the information. I
I understand the replacing of the hard drive on a laptop being pretty easy to do, but what about all the programs and data on the old hard drive? How do you recover that?
>> How do you recover that?
The program is called GetDataBack.
Get it here: http://www.runtime.org/downloads.htm
Works great and worth the money.
I managed to restore and remove the important stuff yesterday. We should be OK.
However, it’s obvious the drive is failing in stages. Even after all the cleansing, there were more bad sectors later.
Wow, this was very cool like an episode of 24 with “Agent Gunjan” talking you through the fix. Nice mix of technical language to fascinate guys like me who don’t have a clue on how these things work. Good writing. A technical “Emmy” to Gunjan.