John E. Perry wrote:
Be interesting to know where all those bucks go. Their "tech" support even forced me to buy a new hard drive so I could wipe suse and my ext3 home partition off the original before they would answer questions about whether I had hardware problems or not.
It wasn't even enough that these were separate partitions in a dual-boot setup.
Hi John, To be fair to the manufacturer, you void the warranty when substantially alter the product. It makes it too difficult, in general, do diagnose problems if you don't have a known baseline to start from. I almost ran into this a couple of weeks ago with the new HP I bought with my own money (I mentioned this when I started this thread). The first thing I did with the new computer was to boot it with the installed Vista just to make sure everything was working OK. Then, I blew Vista away and installed SuSE 11.0. Then, I noticed problems with the NIC connection. Was the problem SuSE's or HP's? It seemed to work with Vista, but I couldn't prove anything since it didn't exist anymore. I checked HP's web site and noticed that they had a ROM BIOS update. Fine, let's flash the BIOS and see what happens! Bzzzzt!!! Wrong! Turns out I needed Vista to install the update! I didn't have the courage to try the flash with a DosBoot floppy, and I couldn't restore Vista because I blew HP's partition away when I reformatted the disk. Sooo, I ordered a Vista reinstall set from HP. They charged a couple of bucks plus shipping and soon I had the restore set in hand and started the process. (BTW, what a PIG! Four CD's and 2.5 hours to reinstall! I have know idea what it was doing, but it was busy!) So now I had a restored computer and the NIC was working again. I performed the flash without issue. Then, I blew away the restored Vista again to try 11.0 (dual-booting didn't seem to work). With 11.0 back the NIC was failing again! This is when I tried Knoppix and an update/recompile of the Realtek kernel module. All failed. The problem was that I had modified the computer from its intended state and since it didn't work it was "my" problem, not HP's. I suppose I could have reinstalled Vista again and try to return it to Frys, but I really needed a computer. This is when I unplugged the wireless board that came with the computer and installed a D-Link PCI-E 1x NIC and never looked back. BTW, SuSE didn't even see the wireless interface, but who cares? Sorry for the long missive, but maybe someone can learn something from my stumbling about. Regards, Lew -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org