Laptop Load Woes

I recently committed to using my personal laptop which is a Toshiba Portege convertible as the tool for white boarding during some recent meetings at work. On the friday before I was due to travel on Monday, the harddrive crashes on the Toshiba and it will not boot. This is the third time this has happened on this laptop. Add that to my concern that having my full music library on the laptop for iTunes use and I decided it was time to put in a new harddrive.

So, off to Best Buy. My Portege does not have a CD, DVD, or Floppy drive. So, I don't really have a good way to boot it except via a PXE server and the recovery CD that came with the machine. I have previously posted about doing this, but you can get good details online. This time the laptop would boot, but the recovery utility kept telling me that the destination drive was not reachable. So, I put the drive in a box that allows me to connect to a computer via a USB port. I made sure it was partitioned and formatted and tried again. Same problem.

So, I put the known bad harddrive in the Portege and tried again. That worked, but I am extremely confident that this harddrive will not last. But, CMS Data Transfer came to the rescue. I used it to transfer the content from the original harddrive to my newone. That worked!

Of course, this post took but minutes to write. The actual experience took me days to complete. After I got the laptop booting, I had to apply all patches and load software. That task is not complete yet, but is on its way.

My next goal is to figure out how to get Vista on this box!