Grad Life–Technical Resolution

This isn’t really a personal post, but I thought I would write down the resolution to a technical issue I brought up on my last journal entry.

So the Gateway tech finally excercised tough love and told me to go call Toshiba. Which I thought at first was the end of the line, but as it happens Toshiba was awesome and helpful.

Toshiba’s tech support number is long distance, which “back in the day” would’ve annoyed me. But now that we live in the age of cell phones, long distance is the same as local – it’s all just minutes. Great. So I called Toshiba tech support and was not put on hold. That blew my mind from the beginning. A woman actually answered and immediately wanted to help me. After a few seconds of me sputtering and not knowing what to do because I wasn’t on hold, I told her the problem, and she identified the issue in about 15sec.

Apparently for some reason Toshiba laptop hard drives have two model numbers. The drive I’m trying to get to work has its main model number which is MK6022GAX, but it has another identity as HDD2184F. The “F” signifies that this drive has non-standard firmware and interface. In this case, the “F” means the hard drive was specially made for Compaq laptops.

The woman told me to look at the Toshiba drive I have that already works, and its model number was HDD2171C. The “C” means that it is a standard issue firmware/interface. It’s the type of drive that I can buy from any reputable source.

Which I guess is the problem. I bought my hard drive from ebay, and I guess this guy had a whole lot of Compaq hard drives, which he mistakenly thought were the same as any other Toshiba drive, but the Toshiba woman told me the hard horrible truth.

So now, I can finally rest. And possibly am one step closer to my dream of having 60GB storage space on my laptop.

I know all of my readers are relieved.