For the past several months, the T61 has been behaving flaky. On booting XP, the hard drive light stays on continuously and things appear to hang, but eventually (like after 10 minutes), it clears up and seems to work reasonably well. I kept Scott's comments about replacing the hard drive in his Mac in the back of my mind, but XP never complained that chkdsk needed to be run, etc., so I wasn't sure that was the problem. There was never any grinding or thunking noise. Memtest86 never found a problem with the RAM. I was beginning to think there was a motherboard problem or something....

As part of my "diagnosis", I disabled a bunch of the Thinkpad utilities since some of the flakiness seemed to start after upgrading those. In the process, I lost automatic wireless connections (had to manually tell the adapter to let Winders run it). :-/ Then, on a lark, I reinstalled them and let the Thinkpad utilities run a diagnostic. What do you know - it says there are bad sectors and it has trouble reading several spots on the disk.... (I see notifications were placed in some of the Winders logs too, buried in the Administrative tools, but I rarely look there.) Linux (on another partition) seemed to run Ok, but I need to be able to run Winders and didn't use it very often.

Bought a 640 GB Samsung SATA to replace the 300 GB Hitachi, along with a Kingwin ATK-25U-S external enclosure. Tried using Clonezilla-SysRescCD to clone the disk, but it complained about errors. I then used ImageforWindows from Terabyte and it completed successfully (but failed on verification, so I disabled that).

I just swapped in the disk, but it wouldn't boot. Hmm. I'm sure Grub experts could solve the problem instantly, but I'm not one of those. Booted a BootItNG Maintenance disk and installed a standard MBR. Rebooted and XP started up. Chkdsk fixed a bunch of things, and here we are.

The plan is to stretch the XP partition, leaving about 50 GB for a fresh install of Ubuntu. Dunno if I'll set up a VM for Ubuntu yet or not...

The Samsung is nearly silent - I haven't run any benchmarks yet.

So far, so good.

Cheers,
Scott.
(Who will try to remember that drives can fail in ways other than catastrophically.)