The Clone Wars
After several days of behaving normally, the hard drive in my primary computer once again refused to boot. This time, instead of just presenting a blank screen with a blinking cursor, it announced "Drive Read Error." Once again, if I swapped the drive to the other Inspiron, it still would not boot.
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I really wish the balky computer would fail a diagnostic test so I would have a better case when I call Dell tech support. OTOH, Dell may not give me the time of day, either; although when I look up my system's extended warranty status, it says I have over 200 days remaining, when I tried to actually initiate a service call, their system responded, "Your service contract has expired." I will have to telephone them and argue with them over the phone, assuming I can even get that far.
This state of affairs is intolerable. I'm planning on swapping a working clone (of the prime/A/B set) into the other computer and using the other computer as my main machine for a while. If the problem really is hardware related -- faulty motherboard/controller -- then the backup computer shouldn't have such difficulties.
Meanwhile, I think I'm also going to see about going through my files and flat-out archviving -- as opposed to backing up -- a good chunk of My Documents. Having these constant scrapes with disaster is not good for my peace of mind.
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I really wish the balky computer would fail a diagnostic test so I would have a better case when I call Dell tech support. OTOH, Dell may not give me the time of day, either; although when I look up my system's extended warranty status, it says I have over 200 days remaining, when I tried to actually initiate a service call, their system responded, "Your service contract has expired." I will have to telephone them and argue with them over the phone, assuming I can even get that far.
This state of affairs is intolerable. I'm planning on swapping a working clone (of the prime/A/B set) into the other computer and using the other computer as my main machine for a while. If the problem really is hardware related -- faulty motherboard/controller -- then the backup computer shouldn't have such difficulties.
Meanwhile, I think I'm also going to see about going through my files and flat-out archviving -- as opposed to backing up -- a good chunk of My Documents. Having these constant scrapes with disaster is not good for my peace of mind.