2nd week of ITS internship 2/1/2010

Today we pulled all the known bad parts out of the computers and made a log of all the parts that were either missing or were bad. If we had them, we went ahead and wrote down the serial numbers of the parts. We did this because Tangent, the company that supplies the computers, will replace the bad parts free of charge, but if they are missing, the school will have to buy the new parts off of them. We sat the bad parts on top of the computer they came from so everybody could easily see where they went. I found it interesting that all of the drives that we had that were bad were the infamous Hitachi Deskstar. The Deskstar line, or Deathstar as was commonly called, was actually bought from IBM; however before Hitachi bought the lineup, it was considered one of the worst hard drive lineups of all time, this Wikipedia article, Deskstar failures, goes into more details about all the problems IBM and Hitachi had over them. Hitachi was supposed to have started making better drives, but it appears they were still having problems, at least when the hard drives we have were made. We also spent some time trying to reinstall windows to see if it was a bad install or a hard drive causing problems on one machine, after some time where the installer seemed frozen and would boot anymore, we decided to pull a known good hard drive from a machine and sure enough it worked fine.