I bought a Dell Latitude CPiA400XT at my local LUG auction for $27, minus the hard drive and caddy. I bought a caddy (powerbrixx dot com--they've got a lot of small parts at reasonable prices, but they were a bit of a pain to deal with, questions about the charge card and so on....) and found a Toshiba 40GB hard drive. Well, it's been a mess. First the computer would not recognize it, thenI upgraded the BIOS from A05 to A15, and it said the drive was password protected. I contacted Toshiba, and they suggested I get a copy of KILLDISK. I had purchased a USB box for it, but KILLDISK would not function through that. Friday I finally got a drive adapter from Adapterz dot com--really cheap prices on all kinds of adapters, and unlike the places in the orient, I actually had the thing in a few days from California--and tried to wipe the drive. Now all it does is screech. I know that W-D. Seagate, and Maxtor all have warranties with no questions asked, but does anyone have any experience with Toshiba? My Social Security does not permit me to just go out and buy another drive, so I hope that they will replace it....

OTOH, if anyone has a drive I can have, please contact me offline....

Incidentally, I got it running at a LUG meeting with MEPIS LITE. I can't change the boot order, and it won't boot from CD, but it will boot from floppy and transfer to CD, and MEPIS, being Debian-based, will allow me to do that. Until I get a larger hard drive (I'm using the 342MB drive from my Austin 486 laptop)that is how I have to use it in LINUX, and unfortunately, I can't get that system to recognize my Belkin wireless card, and I'm having problems getting it to work with my USR G-Max card as well--I presume that is a hardware mismatch thing, but it could be a bad card also....

John H. Waaser

Welcome to LQ. Two comments:

1. Is the drive jumpered correctly?
2. You may wish to reconsider posting your personal contact info. Spam robots routinely patrol websites such as LQ looking to collect Email addresses. You might want to remove it

A brief note re: TOSHIBA. At first they sent me an email stating that even though by their standards the drive was out of warranty, they would replace it with a new drive. I was ecstatic--though I know that all large companies have a fund for customer satisfaction that acts in place of any warranty. Anyway, I packed up the drive and sent it to them. Some time later, I replied to their email to ask what was happening. They said it had never arrived. I sent them proof of delivery a day after I got that message. No response. Next thing I know, I have to take a day off work to receive a Fed-Ex package (THEY have the world's worst attitude toward the consignee of any package) which seemed to be the replacement drive and I did not want to miss it. It was the same old drive, returned without replacement. Why would I ship it to them, with an RMA number all over the box, if I didn't have a promise of replacement? Anyway, I emailed them again, reminding them that I paid to ship it to them, and had to take a day off work to get the package, assuming it was a replacement, only to find that it was the original drive--thus proving, by the way, that they had received it. I will now be turning the matter over to the state consumer protection department, seeking that promised replacement drive.

I would NOT buy another Toshiba product of any description, nor would I recommend that anyone else do so!