Fox

Hi everyone,

I can't think of a better place to put this, so I guess I'll stick it here.

I left my computer, a Dell Latitude C600 dual booting XP Pro and Debian (etch), on overnight downloading a large file.

I went to it this morning to find that it's overheated itself into disconnecting from my wireless network. After a restart, the download is back in progress.

After work, I brought it downstairs and put it on the table, only to find that it's completely frozen- black screen. Now, this machine has been freezing on and off with the higher temperatures this summer, and has had intermittent weirdness. The worst of this happened when I jarred it the slightest bit, and on restart, it said, and I quote: "Inwalid Partitioo Table".

That was a month or two ago, and it has been working very well since then, up until now. All I get when I boot is one character, a lowercase j in the top left hand corner of the screen. I've restarted it about 10 times so far, and no go. Powering it down hard causes that little whirring sound, like a synchromesh of a car spooling up, except in reverse.

Has anybody seen this before? I tried a google search, but obviously it was way too broad to turn up anything worthwhile.

TheMatt

Hi Fox,

I think this is overheating related. If you can take the laptop to a cool place like a basement and see if it will boot. Also, use a can of compressed air to blow the dust out of the bottom. Remove the bottom panels. Make sure that you hold the can of air upright.

Fox

K, I'll try that tomorrow.

I don't have much hope for this, unfortunately- I tried a couple of times from a cold start today, and got the same result :(

If all else fails, I'm going to use my usb enclosure and see what S.M.A.R.T. says about it. If it's dead, oh well- it's just another opportunity to get a larger hard drive and a saner install of Linux.

Thanks!

TheMatt

I would get data off with the USB enclosure, but I doubt a hard disk would cause this much trouble. Hopefully the cool environment will revive it.

Fox

Yeah, the coolness did nothing, still j's across the board.

I'm going to use my 2.5" to 3.5" adapter tonight and stick it in a tower to see if it can be mounted. Otherwise, I'll be shopping for a new one soon. Not that it matters much- it was just a little 30gb drive, and I only paid 20 dollars for the entire machine. Who knows- maybe the anomalies I'd been experiencing were partly to blame on this drive.

TheMatt

Try swapping out one RAM stick, then the other.

Fox

Only one stick of RAM in there.

I've long suspected iffy modules from messeges I got from the linux kernel on bootup, but I don't think this is the cause of the error. I'm getting drive read errors when I try to boot into rescue mode from the Debian disk.

I ordered a 60GB drive for cheap off Newegg, so I'll know for sure whether or not it's something else when I go to load Linux back on to it this week.

I'll let you know how it turns out- thanks for the advice so far :)

TheMatt

You're welcome. Did you make sure to get the correct Interface drive? It takes only IDE or ATA drives - not SATA.

Fox

Yep, I got one of these.

I'm not a huge fan of WD, but if it works, it works.

TheMatt

Thats a nice drive. I usually don't get WD 2.5" drives because a lot of them only have a 2 MB cache, but this one has 8 MB of cache.

Fox

Well, I suppose the computer (or at least the IDE controller) is a little worse for wear after all, because at first when I put it in, it didn't recognize the drive. After fiddling around with it for a while, pulling the drive out at inopportune times for the BIOS, restarting a bunch of times, I finally got the "Boot sector not found on hard drive" or similar message, and the Debian install went without a hitch. Maybe tomorrow I'll clear everything off again, put windows on a tiny partition, and stick AROS or OSX on there for kicks just to see if they'll work.