so my hard drive finally shat, i was running a 160GB partitioned into 80/80... one for os/apps/work-area and the other partition for temporary media storage.

thankfully most of my stuff had been offloaded to my server or grown obsolete, so i'm only lacking my recent downloads and a few documents, nothing tragic.

so i'm thinking for the rebuild (i've already ordered two 160gb satas to mirror) i'm going to run ubuntu as a base and then virtual machine an XP and an osX86. I've used vmware in the past, but only to run win98 to play some awful old games... is it still the choice for virtualization or is microsoft's thing worthwhile at all?

anyone running virtual?


and i'll have to check my datestamp, but i think my harddrive might still be under warranty... any issues with sending a drive with a few 10-20 gigs of pirated material in for refurbishing? anyone tried that yet?

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Originally posted by Dwaggy
Thats alot of words for someone that sells DVDs out of the back of a truck

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don't know about sending the drive in; think a case transplant would do the trick? we used to swap cases and heads at my old job doing data recovery and i think there's some google information on the subject, but that was ide. never done a sata transplant.

as to the vmware, i can't say that i ran it off an umbuntu platform (kinda curious myself now) but when loaded from xp, it worked just fine. it was more for beta testing than anything tho. didn't want to foul up my good pc without trying it on my virtual os first.

i remember some of the issues it had made it difficult to determine if it was the virtual os acting up or the newly extracted software. for the most part, it served it's purpose.

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just pretend i said something smart and funny...

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Don't run VMware, nor do I do any virtualization.

As for the drive, unless it contains child porn, data recovery companies and manufacturers typically don't really care. There is the burden of proof, and other legal hastles that make it very not worthwhile.

I have sent in drives to Maxtor and Seagate with questionable (pirated) shit on them, and never had an issue. of course, that was a few years ago.

Take a big ass magnet to it before you send it in. They aren't going to recover data from it, just test the functionality and replace it.

good luck!

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You could also smash it to pieces with a hammer and send the bits in.

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Statistically... 9 out of 10 people actually enjoy gang rape.

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