What a weekend. I fired up my Debian laptop last night and things seemed wonky. When I tried executing basic commands they weren’t found. I couldn’t vi, sudo, nothing. When I rebooted the drive was DOA. The system kept saying “Checking media” and then it’d fail. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting but it was screwed in place so it couldn’t have come loose. Nothing seemed to work. I guess the drive went to the big ether in the sky.
I headed off for a quick trip to Best Buy and scored the same Samsung EVO 850 (in a 500GB size) for just $153! This is normally a $200 drive but it was on sale. Now here’s a pro tip: ALWAYS double check the pricing online. The online price was lower than the in-store sale price. Best Buy is one store that actually price matches their online store.
I was literally in and out of the store in under 5 min. It was a male shopper’s dream! The longest part of the ordeal was simply waiting for the ISO for Fedora to download. Since we use RHEL at work and my home server is CentOS I decided to swap Debian for Fedora 23. Unfortunately my Comcast has been sucking lately and instead of 50Mbps down I’m getting more like 20. 🙁
Anyway, I’m up and writing this on Fedora now. I’ve made some tweaks but it’s mostly stock. One thing I did is swap out the display manager for Cinnamon. Oddly enough the touchpad didn’t work (for clicking) until then. I could navigate but I had to :: gasp :: use the buttons if I wanted to click or right-click.
Hibernate is also working now that I added the swap UUID to the GRUB config and rebuilt. I think I’m going to put Fedora back on my mom’s Toshiba to see if it works for her. That’s actually the distro I first loaded but I don’t recall why I replaced it.
So there you go. My laptop never gave me a lick of trouble and then BAM! I’m still hoping it’s not totally dead. I’m going to throw it in the enclosure to see if I can at least get some data off of it.