Yesterday afternoon I was working from home, Maddie was sick and Mommy could not take off so that left me to care for the bambino. I was in the middle of coding Salute The Veterans new site [to be posted soon] when my laptop stopped responding.
I tried the three fingered salute and no response. So I did a hard shutdown. When I tried to bring it back up all I got were some blinking lights. I determined pretty quickly that it become "bricked". Fortunately for me I have at least three old laptops lying around because I don't buy new laptops. I have no need for the latest and greatest since I use Arch Linux as my OS and besides that I can outfit an entire branch office with decent used laptops for the cost of one new laptop.
I was using a Dell C640, which was one that I really liked because the video supported 1400x1050 resolution. Two of my spares are Dell C610's a close, older cousine of the C640 that does not have the nice hi-res monitor and adapter. So I grabbed one of those.
One thing that is real nice about this series of Dell notebooks is easy access to the hard drive. Directly on the right side of the laptop is a slot with one screw. Remove the screw,pull the slot out and you are holding your hardrive. Nice! All I did was swap hard drives and fire the C610 up.
GRUB warned about unsupported framebuffers then gave me the chance to select a different one. After that everything booted fine. I fired up emacs and changed my resolution in xorg.conf. Then changed GRUBS menu.lst to reflect the new framebuffer resolution. Saved the changes and ran startx. Everything came up fine.
Now you can do this in windows, but I don't recommend it. The hoops you have to jump through to pull it off is just way to much work for me. Linux on the other hand makes it as easy as editing two files. I was up and running in less than three minutes.
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