Maximum PC

Hey all,

I've been having the worst time with Linux on my MSI GX630 laptop, largely since I put it's original HDD back in place (I took it out on suspicion it was causing the noise I found to be the HSF).

The problem appears to be that if I power the machine up and boot straight into Linux, it will Segfault. However, if I let it sit at the bootloader for 30 seconds or so, or reboot from Linux once it does boot, or reboot from Windows, not a problem.

Windows OTOH doesn't seem to care if the machine is cold, it boots just fine.

I'm becoming suspicious it has to do with the HDD, but how? Any way to resolve this other than swapping out the HDD?

Peace,
Dan O.

So was the event happening with a different hard drive in there?

Not that I can recall...

However, that alone doesn't entirely isolate it to a hardware issue with the hard drive...

When I swapped it back, I used dd to move the partitions back. IIRC, I also utilized GParted to do some growing / shrinking because the drive I used temporarily while I was trying to rule out the cause of the noise was only 160GB, vs the OEM 250GB that the machine came with.

This laptop isn't new either. I purchased it on eBay for $200 as part of an "as-is" auction. The original owner knew something was wrong with it, tried wiping and re-installing Windows, but still ran sluggish.

I've cleaned out the HSF since I got it, and put some oil in the fan bearings, and it runs just fine over-all. The fan still makes a loud noise though, especially when cold, once it warms up to temp it's barely audible.

IIRC, I only ran it for a couple weeks before swapping out the HDD, and then ran it for a few months before getting around to putting original back in.

Dan O.