Western Digital Scorpio Black 320 GB hard drive dying ... so I'm running Lucid Puppy in the interim

The Western Digital 320 GB Scorpio Black hard drive I bought from NewEgg.com more than a month ago (and which I only recently got around to breaking out of the box and installing) is dying. This is the drive from which I've been running Fedora 13.

Those annoying clicks when the drive first boots (and occasionally thereafter) are not normal. The smartctl utility hasn't provided much help, nor has the diagnostic image that WD offers on their Web site (which runs with Dr. DOS — who remembers Dr. DOS??)

But the clicking persisted. I was prepared to ignore it and curse WD, especially because the cheaper WD Scorpio Blue drive I also have exhibits none of these symptoms.

Today the WD Scorpio Black started throwing i/o errors. The computer would stop in mid process with the disk light pegged. Amid the clicks it wouldn't boot at times.

Had this been under the 30-day mark, I would have been able to return the drive to NewEgg. But it's more than that. So I'm going to return it to WD.

In the interim, I set up Lucid Puppy to run on the Lenovo G555. The X configuration was a bit dicey. It didn't autoconfigure properly. I had to manually choose the 1280x800, which for some reason yielded the laptop's native resolution of 1366x768. That's a bit quirky (and yes, I've tried the Puppy spinoff Quirky and do like it).

I managed to add the Ubuntu Universe repository so I could install gThumb, which didn't run at first due to the missing dependency libesd.so.0.

Why does an image viewer/editor need the Enlightened Sound Daemon, you ask? I have no idea.

But there is no libesd package that I can access via the Ubuntu repositories in Puppy (and I did refresh them).

However, there is the esound package, which includes libesd. I installed that, and gThumb started working.

I could have dropped the original Windows 7-running WD Scorpio Blue hard drive back into the laptop while I wait for my new WD Scorpio Black drive to arrive, but I didn't do that. Instead I'm booting Lucid Puppy from the live CD and saving files in my regular ext3 partition on my USB-connected Toshiba hard drive.

I'll reserve judgment on Western Digital until I see how the return/replacement of the spotty drive goes. But right now I'm looking at the Toshiba and Hitachi drives I've purchases in the past year in a much more positive light. Haven't had a problem with those. And they were cheaper, too.

I've always thought Lucid Puppy was a great idea. Being able to leverage the huge Ubuntu repository, especially that of a long-term support release, gives Puppy a kind of flexibility it didn't have in the 2.x and 3.x days when I ran it quite a bit.

One thing I can tell you is that Lucid Puppy seems to be as blindingly fast as any other version I've tried. Mind you, this is new hardware with an AMD Athlon II at 2.something GHz (can't remember at present). I just turned on frequency scaling a) because I can and b) because I really don't need full power in Puppy and would welcome the cooler operating temperature that should result.