voodoo

time to start believing in voodoo..

first, i figured out that the wlan card (zyxel zyair g-100) i bought upon recommendation (by another lugs-member) is not that great at all.. looks like an increasing number of wlan card manufacturers don’t include flash-eprom chips anymore.. as a consequence, one needs to fiddle with firmware files for using this card with linux. how nasty! and this just because of a lacking 0.10 $ piece i’d gladly overpay with 10 $. thus: don’t buy this card or any other card with a prism54 chip unless you know what you’re doing!

next, i’ve booted my notebook just to find out that its very new 40 gb hdd is broken. it made some rattling noise and that was it. nada, nothing worked anymore.

murphy #1: the data i had on my notebook was the only data i didn’t have backups for (yesterday i remembered i should backup the stuff soon). gone my nice fluxbox-setup, my suse and win xp installations, most of the stuff of my studies, my mindmaps and so on.

murphy #2: i bought this hdd from a shop (computerexpress) that went bankrupt shortly thereafter. can’t return it.

antimurpy #1: murphy #2 doesn’t matter that much as i would never return/send in a hdd containing private data anyway. no way to “dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda”-it, it’s severly broken.

at least i still had the old hard disk at hand. transplantation went smoothly, patient (i.e. my notebook) is alive again. yet it’s a very regrettable thing. apart from losing my data i now have to live with the ibm-hdd’s much smaller (6 gb instead of 40 gb), slower and louder predecessor again. dang.

this is now the 3rd 2.5″ hdd within 15 months that died (r.i.p.) and for the first time it was my notebook’s hdd (the other two hdds died due to overheating inside my barebone-server). two of these hdds were manufactured by ibm (now hitachi). coincidence?

antimurphy #2: i probably won’t install linux on that 6 gb hdd again. it’s too much of a hassle (my notebooks hw is rather specific) and space is scarce. positive effect: no need to worry about proprietary and silly wlan cards anymore ;)

antimurphy #3: having lost all that data i am at the starting point again. plenty of options, no more legacy stuff.. os-wise i might even try to install longhorn. i doubt this is a good idea (hw is probably not powerful enough), but it might be worth trying.

it’s not only time to start believing in voodoo, it’s probably also time to watch the market for new notebooks/tabletpcs..