One day, when I was rebooting my computer after an installation, it stopped working when it reached “starting windows”.

So I tried to start my computer again but nothing better happened. Then I think of installing another operating system may help, that is what I always do on my computer time.

If I install Redhat Enterprise Linux, the error will be: Reading/Writing error on disk. If I try to install Windows 7, it cannot even detect my hard disk drive! Even the factory rescue and recovery disks have problem on preparing hard disk. My friend’s father came to help, but his idea did not work as I expected.

Now I think I have some hardware problem. So my dad contacted the IBM Parts service to buy a new hard drive. Because my computer is out of warrantee, they cannot give us the FRU number for my hard drive. I need that number to purchase the same hard drive as I have now.

So we must open the back cover and look ourselves, we gave them the number. But they said the hard drive we requested costs $180! My computer is only worth $200! We’d rather buy a new computer!

I know there is a computer shop called Downmills Computers beside our house; we went there to see what they say about this. We found out that there is a hard drive that works with my computer for only $80. My dad bought it for me immediately! “It worked!”

I was never sure what caused it, but I guess one of my small system partitions I created crashed…