I’ve wasted all of today trying to get my new 750Gb Samsung SpinpointF1 hard disk to work. I tried it in the eSATA enclosure on the VIA interface, that was dead iffy – with it randomly disappearing, locking the machine when I wrote to it and generally being shite. So I downloaded the utility to force SATA150 mode instead of SATA300, that seemed to make things worse – actually causing Linux to hang just after grub.

Then I tried it on the SIL3114 that my four WD drives work on just dandy – well with the Samsung the BIOS just stopped trying to detect the size of the drive! It kind of worked in my USB2 enclosure, but that was more due to not being able to check it using smartctl or hdparm.

So I’ve concluded that the drive is duff and have RMA’d it back to Scan – hopefully they won’t send me a replacement as I wouldn’t be able to trust the drive now, Scan don’t seem to stock the Seagate 7200.11 drive and for some reason the lower spec WD-AAKS costs more! So hopefully I can get my money back and purchase from ebuyer, although its not going to be sorted in time to take back to France with me.

I also tried to replace my Nvidia 5200 with the 6200 that I bought, well that didn’t work either, the Nvidia drivers didn’t seem to like it at all and the opensource “nv” drivers didn’t like it much either, so back to the 5200 until I upgrade to Fedora9 and do a fresh install. As part of trying to get the Nvidia drivers working I did a kernel upgrade to 2.6.23 (didn’t help) which seems to work fine with VMWare.

I did manage to get my new Logitech keyboard working without any fuss – its quite large but quiet and sturdy. I also replaced the noisey case fan, although I might have replaced the wrong one as there still seems to be a noise. The new one’s LEDs are much brighter though!

It seems Mum is coming back with me from France now, not PP or RS.

I watched Sex And Breakfast, which was a comedy about swingers. It wasn’t very good, and didn’t even feature Eliza Dushku naked, which could have been its saving grace 🙁

Update: just watched Sydney White, which is a modern day Snow White, it was quite funny, but really just another fraternity vs. dorks movie.