My HP dv9000t (custom build) that I have had since February 2007, had it's hinge break a few weeks ago.

Apparently this is a known (common) issue with this size of Pavillion laptop.

Warranty process went easily and smoothly, I had it back in about 5 days, however, upon receiving it back, the package dropped off by FedEx was badly mangled, with a big hole in it. Looked like someone played soccer with it. I made the FedEx guy make a note of it, and I took a photo before opening. Sure enough, the hard drive just made the dreaded "spin-click" and wouldn't boot. And HP had gone ahead and replaced one of the two hard drives, the DVDRW, the base, the top, the entire screen assembly and screen, and even more. Phew! It was practically a complete overhaul, but I had to send it back.

I received it back the second time about a week and half later. They had replaced both hard drives, and performed a little more overhaul surprisingly. So, now this laptop is pretty much like new.

Of course, it came with Windows XP Media Center (blech!). Just for the sake of supporting clients, I keep it, and Vista, but never use them for my own work.

I have the free Vista Home Premium upgrade with it, so I run the install, but install Vista to a different partition on the second hard drive (yes, this laptop actually holds TWO hard drives simultaneously!), and stop it from wiping XP, so I am able to dual boot it between the two (since Vista is a totally worthless pieces of phlegm). :-P

Finally, after using Knoppix live DVD 2008 to resize the NTFS partitations, I have today finally finished installing OpenSuSE 10.3

After all the evaluations I've been doing for so many Linux distros (see www.techtalkhawke.com, and despite Suse being one of the more bloated and slower distros, it still gives me the least grief on hardware and software, and when using KDE, runs MUCH more stable than any of the Gnome distros.

I setup the drives up in a complicated way. Hard drive 0 is as follows:
partition 0 (/dev/sda1) = NTFS = Windows XP (and boot drive) (30 GB)
partition 1 (/dev/sda2) = d7 (HP) (I moved it from near the end of the drive, to right after the XP (2 GB)
partition 2 (/dev/sda3) = ext2 for /boot for Suse 10.3 (later on 11, the 11 beta 1 was unusable) (1 GB)
partition 3 (/dev/sda4) = extended for rest....
partition 4 (/dev/sda5) = Linux Raid autodetect (40 GB) / = ext3
partition 5 (/dev/sda6) = Linux Raid autodetect (40 GB) /home = ext3 plus encryption

Hard Drive 1 is as follows:
partition 0 (/dev/sdb1) = NTFS = Windows Vista Home Premium (30 GB)
partition 1 (/dev/sdb2) = Linux Swap (3 GB)
partition 2 (/dev/sdb3) = extended for rest of drive usages....
partition 3 (/dev/sdb5) = Linux Raid autodetect (40 gb) / = ext3
partition 4 (/dev/sdb6) = Linux Raid autodetect (50 gb) /home = ext3 plus encryption

HD 0 partition 4 and HD 1 partition 3 are setup as a RAID1 "mirror" array mounted for the root partition "/"
HD 0 partition 5 and HD 1 partition 4 are setup as a RAID1 "mirror" array mounted for the /home partition

Additionally the /home partition is encrypted.

So, lots of layers of complexity in this setup, but performing like a champ, and much easier to do this setup under Suse than any of the other distros, all through the GUI tools during setup.

Part of the reason I am putting this here, is in case I need it for later for myself. But also maybe it will help others considering making the most of their similar laptops with two hard drives.

Once I"m fully moved (back) over to this HP (which I'm typing this blog entry from right now), I will wipe Ubuntu 7.10 off of my Dell (that's what it came with), And (attempt to) install the lastest OpenBSD 4.3 (just came out and is en route in the mail), and the latest Solarix x86, and then MAYBE I'll try the newer 8.04 ubuntu (though I can't stand Gnome), and/or set it up with Kubuntu (if it's worth anything, we'll see).

This way, between my three laptops I can cover just about any operating system i might run into when helping folks out. Summary of my laptops in my (heavy) laptop bag and their proposed OSes:

Ciao for now! -Hawke