My ThinkPad locked up today, and, when I rebooted, it didn’t think it had a hard drive. So either the hard drive is dead or something is wrong with the ThinkPad, and it’s no longer recognizing the drive. I wasn’t really in the mood to spend a lot of time troubleshooting today, but I went as far as pulling and re-seating the drive. That didn’t help. If I have some ambition tomorrow, I’ll remove it and try to mount it externally, maybe connected to my desktop or my MacBook.
I’m not too worried about this, since the ThinkPad has basically become my “third choice” computer. I use my MacBook the most (every day), my Dell desktop PC second most (generally for more “serious” stuff), and the ThinkPad gets booted up maybe once a month. I also don’t have anything really important on the hard drive. Everything important is in OneDrive or Evernote. If the drive is dead, I probably lost my saved game of Neverwinter Nights, but I’d pretty much given up on that anyway.
I bought the ThinkPad in 2011, and replaced the original hard drive with an SSD in 2014. So the laptop is more than six years old and the drive is a bit more than three years old. If the machine is dead, well, it was probably time. If the drive is dead, then I’m a little disappointed with that, since I think an SSD ought to last at least five years.
I’d like to get the machine working again, if I can, but if I can’t, that’s fine. It’s a pretty old machine and it might be time for a new one. Or maybe it’s time to give up on the idea of owning three computers. The desktop and the MacBook are good enough, especially when you add in the iPad, the iPhone, the work laptop, the work iPad, and all the other random computing devices in my apartment. Maybe it’s time to downsize a bit!
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