My daughter's Dell has a 40Mb hard drive. It developed a big bad spot that prevented the computer from booting, or doing anything usable. The technical side of Dell was very supportive, in the sense of providing instruction by English- speaking Indians who actually seemed to know what they were doing, and who provided direct callback numbers to bypass the queue, responded to email, stayed on the line during some of the shorter diagnostic procedures, and just did everything possible to salvage the drive without trashing the contents.
Once the drive was declared dead at the age of 13 months, and not recoverable, the business side of Dell just flat refused to:
- acknowledge or even investigate a paper snafu whereby a 24 month service conctract had morphed into an unwanted external floppy drive.
- replace the drive under warranty.
- sell a replacement drive at a reasonable price, or even a street price.
Oddly enough, when the same drive is sold at retail, it carries a five year warranty, but I guess Dell buys them without warranty.
With Knoppix and DSL Linux (I forget why, but I had to use both) I was able to copy nearly all of her content to a USB external hard drive, repartition the drive so the bad area is not used, reformat it, and copy most everything back to the (now 30Mb) hard drive, and get it running and usable again.
All of this was done while we were on vacation, in a location where Walmart is the only source of computer parts within 50 miles.
I mostly use dialup on a second POTS line, and most ISO images will download within a day or two with BitTorrent. Knoppix is really big, though. It's probably worth buying the book "Knoppix Cheat Codes" just to save the download time. DSL is really small, and might be good enough, depending on what you need to do.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
![[cheers]](/data/assets/smilies/cheers.gif "[cheers] [cheers]")
