My laptop died a spectacular death the other night.

Everything on it was working mostly fine,but I had decided that after playing with xubuntu, on my EEE PC for the last few weeks, that I wanted to give it a go on the big beast.

I downloaded the AMD64 iso, burned it to a nice new Fuji CD-R, and rebooted with the disk in the DVD Drive. All looked good until the installer got to 76%, and just stopped doing anything. I did a bit of trouble shooting, including re-burning the CD, doing looking for checksum errors, as well as using an external DVD-RW to install, instead of the internal one, which has been flaky lately.

Turns out, the 120 GB Seagate Drive I bought to replace the 100 GB Hitachi Drive (which had died a horrible death) is developing some bad sectors, in the area that I had specified for /usr. Consequently, the OS was refusing to install.

Being the stubborn fuck that I am, I refused to admit defeat, and kept poking around with it, before I take the disk back to the store I purchased it from for an RMA. I did the obscene, and installed Vista. Which, has lead me to some interesting observations.

• Vista installed on the partition with bad sectors,with no problems at all.
• Linux was refusing to install on the same sectors.
• Linux would, and did install with no problems at all, so long as I avoided installing data to those sectors,the (x)(k)ubuntu installer simply refuse to write to them. I haven’t tried vanilla Debian yet, but you know me, and I will.
• Vista, is still a fat, bloated pig. I installed Vista Business, because it has all the features that I want (I use an NT Domain at home, with my media server acting as the domain controller), with out the features that I don’t care about (native support for TV Tuner cards, etc)
• xubuntu, with XFCE, is fast as hell with very little tweaking. Everything just works, including my Broadcom wireless card. No issues at all.

I am having mixed feelings on how the installation went though, and what my experiences with Vista have been.

At first, I was irritated to shit that the Vista installed was “better” and able to work around those bad sectors with no problems at all. I was bothered, that my beloved Ubuntu, was not able to make the same corrections, and that I was going to have to RMA the disk. Then, I sat back and thought about it for a bit.

Vista, gave me no indication at all that there was a problem with the hardware, it probably just mapped around the sectors in place, and ignored them. This means, I lose (probably at most a few Kb) of hard disk space. But, it ignored the fact that the disk is dying. This could, in the future lead to complete and total data loss, if the disk died with no indication. The ubuntu installer, was at least gracious enough to say “hold it, there is a problem her” and give me an error code, that I could google, and find out what was going on.

I am honestly, not sure which approach I like better

• The Vista approach was great, because it just worked. I had a working laptop again a couple hours later, once it completed installing. It was like that one brand of hair coloring, Nice N Easy.
• The Ubuntu solution was to not install at all. I can see how this would help to perpetuate the myth, that Linux is hard to install and use.
• The Vista approach, would have eventually lead to a catastrophic failure of the disk, with no warning at all, but at least I would have had a computer to use in the mean time. No wonder PC’s have a reputation for being fussy, and unreliable.
• The ubuntu solution, told me right away that there was a problem, but only because I am an experienced enough user (I’ve been using Debian, and it’s variants damn near exclusively since 2001) that I knew ctrl+alt+f1 would take me to a console, that was spitting out the error message. There was nothing at all to indicate a problem with the hardware from the X11 based installer. It just failed completely. No error, nothing. My dad, would have never found the problem.

Both solutions have their advantages, but both of those advantages, at least in my mind cover up a severe shortcoming in the product in question.

Personally, I think the ubuntu approach, with the increased focus on reliability, should be the way things are done. They should have made it easier for me to trouble shoot what the problem was though. I know that ubuntu, with it’s focus on “Linux for the people” is trying to make things as easy as possible for all of us, and making me drop down to a console to trouble shoot an installation problem does not help to achieve that goal at all. Having said that, I am pretty sure if I chose the advanced install options, it would have given me more information, so I am probably at fault here.

The Microsoft approach, to me at least seems to be one of covering blemishes with a really heavy make up. I don’t really have a huge problem with them doing that, it is after all their expected behavior. What I do have a problem with, is that it was not their blemish that was covered up. It was Seagate’s. Possibly even Compaq’s. I have no problem with a company that does not want to air their proverbial dirty laundry, but the fact that the installed gave me no indication at all that there was a problem with the hardware bothers the hell out of me. It was no a Microsoft problem that they were covering up, it was a problem, it was more serious than that.

I am currently playing with some SMART monitoring tools under xubuntu, to try to get more information on what exactly is wrong with the disk, so that I can have a print out of the errors when I take it back to the store, in order to alleviate any “this guy doesn’t know wtf he is talking about” issues with the tech’s. I will keep you posted.