🚀 go-pugleaf

First, an apology for English in the two Japanese newsgroups: Sumimasen ga,
nihongo de yoku kakemasen kara, eigo de kakimasu. Nihongo no henji mo ii
desu. Soshite, kikai to sofuto ha zenbu nihon no mono desu yo.

Sorry for the shotgun approach, but I've gotten more than a bit desperate
after long and futile searching.

Problem is with a new 2 gig HDD for an older laptop. My selection was quite
limited--in fact, in the stores I searched, I was only able to find one that
was physically the right size, but it didn't come with any software. It's a
Toshiba MK-2101 MAN model. It seems to work, but most of the capacity is not
recognized. I think a disk partition program like EZ Drive would fix it, but
things get complicated there.

Some HDD makers have versions of EZ Drive that are downloadable for their
drives, but if Toshiba has such a arrangement, I've failed to find it
anywhere in the English and Japanese Toshiba sites. At this point in my
frustration I would gladly buy it from EZ Drive's home web site--the price
is very reasonable--but I can't. No credit card. (I'll search the local
stores next.) Also, though most people say good things about it--including
regarding its compatibility with Linux--I wasn't able to find confirmation
regarding this particular Toshiba drive.

The machine is actually an AST, but they've farmed out the support for their
older machines to another company, and so far no help there. Toshiba
actually tries to avoid doing any direct support for their HDDs, since they
sell all of them to OEMs and not to the public.

I'm about out of ideas, and I surely ran out of patience a long time ago.
Does someone out there have a useful idea? Of course, the best thing would
be a URL for the secret Toshiba page that provides that support... But maybe
they don't have that kind of license, and just dump the problem back on
their OEM customers? This Linux project has been purrrty frustrating.

I'd appreciate a copy of your reply via email--it's easy to miss replies
when you're using a shotgun, and again I apologize for that desperation...

--
.sig
Everyone's crazy save thee and I, and sometimes I wonder about thee. But I
don't wonder about the spamnuts--they are crazy beyond all question.