9/26/2006

Don’t Buy Seagate

Cardoe wrote this in the wee hours:

So my Myth box which was less then two months old had a HD failure on Sept 11th 2006. It was a Seagate 7200.9 300gb SATA2 drive. Replaced the drive with another IDENTICAL drive. Guess what I’m watching right now? SeaTools report to me that the new HD is bad. This time I will RMA the drive and I’m NOT happy at all. That gives those drives an average life span of 32 days. These drives have a warrenty of 5 years, how in the world they could fail so quickly is beyond me. I know people will suggest I did something to the drives but I handled them with nothing but care. The only thing they did was compile and record TV for me, both drives were in my MythTV boxes. Initially two separate systems, however they’ve ended up in the same case in the end. They even spent most of their lives in two different buildings. The initial drive spent most of it’s time in my old apartment where as the new drive spent most of it’s time in my new apartment. Unless the drives really can’t handle Linux then there must be some kind of bad batch going around.

The RMA process requires you to ship it back in official Seagate approved shipping material or they can at their option void your warrenty. They list of lots of packing materials that are not appropriate for shipping hard drives, in fact the very same materials that NewEgg.com used to ship the drive to me in the first place. Since I don’t have my original packaging material, which wouldn’t be good anyway. I have to purchase packaging material for $10.00 then ship it to them at my cost using a carrier that provides tracking info (read: FedEx/DHL/UPS). Once they receive my drive then they will ship out a replacement. Or they’ll two-day me a drive and pay for return shipping and I can use the packaging the replacement comes in for $24.95. It feels like a rip off to me. They sold me a bad product, not once, but twice and I have to pay them 1/4 of what I paid for it to have it replaced in a reasonable matter.

In addition they have some annoying bugs with their RMA forms. First big one is you HAVE to disable pop-up blocking, however only on the initial screen where they test if you have a pop-up blocker do they pop up a pop-up. Then you’re forced to go through the same information several times, however it does pre-fill it out for you (like your address on 3 screens in a row). Except it transposes everything one line down, so your name appears in the Address 1 line and your apartment number in the City line so you have to correct it. This is also coupled with the fact that the script tells me “Elapsed Time 0:0:1″. I guess I have time morphing skills.

This is coupled with the RMA I’m currently doing for my video card from my office computer with eVGA. Once that’s complete I’ll write about that process.

* Filed under: General, Linux
* 11 Comments

9/24/2006

byzanz - Screencaster

Cardoe wrote this at around evening time:

Byzanz Demo

I’ve added a new app to the tree that I think is pretty neat and deserves some mention, it’s called byzanz. It is yet another screencaster but it’s unique to Linux as that it creates gif natively (read: no additional client plugins required to view) and does not require any extra apps or X modifications to use. It just works. I think it’s pretty neat and I figured I’d mention it to everyone. You can find it under media-gfx/byzanz.

* Filed under: General, Linux
* 2 Comments

9/20/2006

When Hardware Fights Back

Cardoe wrote this at around evening time:

Monday morning my boss asked me if I wanted a new processor for my development machine at the office. I had a Athlon64 3200+ in my system and he asked if a Athlon64 X2 3800+ would be enough. Sure, why not? The package arrived today from, NewEgg.com today and I built up a SMP kernel, ensured my motherboard had a BIOS revision that could handle it and shutdown my box and popped in the new processor and hit the power button. Fans spin up and NADA! Reseat everything… try again. Fans and nothing else. Swap in the old processor. Same results. Connected some LEDs to the JDBG header and found out it’s hanging in Video Initialization. Swapped in a different video card (a PCI card rather then PCI-Express) and the system boots. Left both cards in and lspci sees both cards. Tried to start X and it hung. However it did see the PCI-Express card as I did check the log after a hard reboot. I checked eVGA’s website and sure enough there was a BIOS update. After a painful registration process (the ASP page kept hanging up), I got the BIOS with the instructions to run it from a command prompt. So I created a DOS bootdisk tossed it on there and tried it out. Sure enough, Windows Command Prompt application. So I grabbed a spare HD in the office and installed Windows XP, ran the BIOS update and it detected 1 of my 2 cards as eligible for update and it flashed it. After all this work I tested it yet again, NADA! I’m at a complete loss, only guess is that it’s either the motherboard, the video card, possibly the PSU. Here’s the system specs.

  • AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ or AMD Athlon64 3200+
  • MSI K8N Neo4 V2.0 (MS-7125) motherboard
  • eVGA NVidia 6200LE w/ 128mb RAM (DVI-I, VGA, S-Video outputs)
  • 1GB Dual Channel Dual Sided DDR400 in 512mb sticks for Dual Channel.
  • 120gb SATA Seagate 7200.7/7200.9 (can’t remember) HD

If anyone’s got any clues, please share. I’m going to buy a new video card tomorrow to test. But this is the only PCI-Express system at the office so I have nothing else to test in whether it’s the card, the motherboard or PSU.

* Filed under: General, Linux
* 2 Comments