[ubuntu-uk] Lenovo N500 will not load Ubuntu

[Neil Greenwood]

On 5 August 2010 15:58, Rowan Berkeley <rowan.berkeley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 04 Aug 2010 15:26:58 +0100, Rob Beard <rob at esdelle.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> On 04/08/10 12:26, Rowan Berkeley wrote:
>> > I looked at the SMART data, and the only warning entry was that
>> > overheating "has occurred in the past," which they say is a sign of
>> > "old-age." The computer is only just over a year old, i.e., just out
>> > of guarantee. So not much to be done about that, but thanks. Rowan.
>> >
>> Luckily hard drives aren't too expensive.  Chances are since it's only
>> about a year old it'll have a SATA hard drive in there.  You can get
>> 2.5" SATA hard drives reasonably cheap, I got a 320GB one for about
>> £40 a couple of months ago, I believe they're a bit cheaper now
>> depending what size you want. Rob
>>
> Um, well, overall SMART says it's OK.
>[snip]

Google published a report about 12-18 months ago analyzing the
thousands of hard drives in (at least) one of their datacentres. They
found that a large proportion of drives that SMART claimed were in
imminent danger kept running for months, whereas almost 50% of drives
that failed showed no SMART problems beforehand.

So I would only treat SMART as a guideline rather than a clean bill of health.

Cofion/Regards,
Neil.