Hi,

Hoping to benefit from the collective wisdom of the group with regard
to computer systems. So far over a period of about 2 years I've
brought home from the scrapyard three different E-machine computers,
all of which had a blown-up power supply made by Bestec - I get the
feeling that that is reason enough to turn around and run the other
way, once you see the 'Bestec' name, since out of those three systems,
the only thing that was still usable that I have found was one 128Mb
stick of ram. Until the other day...

I was sorting out what I could drop off at the recyclers, scrapyard
and landfill, when I once again hooked up a Western Digital 40 Gb hard
drive, and once again got a bunch of grief from it, until I put a WD
utilities disk in the floppy drive, just to run the mfg's utilities on
it before tossing it. I selected for the program "install EZbios" -
just because I hadn't done that before, ya know? Next, I told it to
restore track 0 (zero), which it seemed happy enough to do. Long
story short, this drive which I couldn't even complete any kind of
diagnostic test on previously, I was now able to load Ubuntu on, and I
used it for 3 days in a row for my usual news-gathering activities.
Then, this morning in the middle of my readings the system went brain-
dead on me.

Of course, the first thing I suspect is the HD. I shut the system
down and let it sit for 15 or 20 minutes, then checked to make sure
there's no lose connectors or the like, nothing is unusually warm, and
then unplug and replug everything (possibly the stick of ram wasn't
quite seated right, everything else seemed OK) and started it back up
- booted into Ubuntu 8.04 fine, I let it idle awhile then shut it down
for the day. I can hardly wait to see what tomorrow may bring 8^).

Just wondering if any one had any info or thoughts on why the HD was
seemingly revived by the 'install EZbios' and 'restore track zero'
moves that I put on it, and also what I might do to make a more
effective repair to this drive, or at least a diagnostic that will
tell me if something's wrong with it - I really think it would benefit
from a low-level format but I don't have a program for that at the
moment. The Western Digital diagnostics pronounce it to be error-
free.

Thanks,
Mike