How to replace the internal hard-drive in an Imation Apollo 500GB 2.5″ portable hard-drive
A few months ago I got an Apollo 500GB 2.5″ portable hard-drive from Imation. It’s nice and compact and I used it to store movies, music and other random crap. About a month ago I was trying to copy a few files onto the device when I noticed that operation was extremely slow. It was so slow that it was pretty much unusable. I wanted to test it out and see what the problem was, but I got busy with work and also my parents were visiting and so I was flying to California almost every weekend. When I finally got around to testing it out, I found that I couldn’t even mount the drive properly now. I could neither do it in Windows 7 nor in Ubuntu 9.04. Ubuntu would recognize the drive and it also saw that there was a partition on there, but other than that it wouldn’t do anything. I tried to use gparted to format it, but it wouldn’t even show up there. In Windows 7, I used Computer Management and when to Drive Manager. Intially the drive wouldn’t show up, but after unmounting and remounting it a few times, it finally showed up. I deleted the existing partition, made a new one, and then tried to format it. The format never finished; it was taking far too long. I then tried to format it in Ubuntu and this time gparted saw the drive, but it was unable to format it as well. I suspected that it might have some hardware issues (which is strange, because it’s not like I used it in a rough manner. Imation should probably make their drives tougher!) and so I tried to run some SMART tests on it. Ubuntu’s smartmontools doesn’t support USB drives. But on Windows, I used a trial version of ArgusMonitor to test the drive. As I suspected, there were a whole bunch of errors. Many sectors were unreadable and Argus suggested that I back-up all data immediately. I didn’t have much data on there anyway and so I figured the drive was pretty much toast. Then for kicks I wondered if I could replace the internal hard-drive. It’s basically a 2.5″ SATA hard-drive and I had an extra one lying around, and so I decided to see if I could replace the hard-drive.
Read more »
Popularity: unranked [?]
Qwest charges a “setup fee” for static IP’s
Two weeks ago, I finally got my DSL upgrade from a measly 3Mbps to a whopping (for me) 12Mbps. I have been on 3Mbps since 2004, and the difference is amazing. I’m able to stream HD quality stuff from Netflix all the time! Qwest set me up with an Actiontec Q1000 router/modem, which as far as routers go, is not that great. But it does the job… somewhat. My previous modem (also from Qwest) would let me grab multiple IP’s from Qwest if I had it plugged into a switch (every machine that was plugged into that switch got an IP from Qwest’s pool). However, the Actiontec is different. Since it’s a router, it basically just enables DHCP and gives you an address. This was a problem for me because I have three machines that face the outside world and I use DynDNS so that I can access them. The router does some port-mapping, but that wasn’t an option. Since my website was my top priority, I set it up in a DMZ and figured that I could access the other two machines through my webserver, so no big deal. But yeah, didn’t work completely. DynDNS uses the modem’s IP for my webserver. I can access my website without any problem, from the outside world. But if I try to get to it from within my network, I end up at the Actiontec’s configuration page. Stupid. So eventually I just decided to get some static IP’s. The price was pretty reasonable: a block of 8 for $14.99 a month. Then I saw the setup fee: $50. Seriously? FIFTY dollars to set up a block of IP addresses? Read more »
Popularity: unranked [?]