Yea as they say...best laid plans...
Suddenly started getting the message "All boot options are tried, press F4 blah blah blah" on the new laptop 'puter (yes, my gorgeous Ferrari yellow Samsung Series 7 Gamer gaming rig). First time it happened last week I played around a bit in the bios settings and then suddenly got it to boot in safe mode and then restore the system back to its latest restore point (arguably the day before). But it happened again yesterday morning and this time...no luck. No combination of bios changes gave me any joy, and the main HDD with the OS on it just wouldn't come up in the boot priority list. Quickly became apparent that I most likely have a bad hard drive.
After a couple of hours this particular action, see photo, crossed my mind (we've all been there), but realizing I was well within my warranty period I settled down and contacted Samsung Service using their Facebook page. Kudos by the way to Samsung using social media to ask support/technical questions! After a quick description of my problem and what I'd tried, the Samsung rep determined it was a service issue and set me up with a service ticket number and e-mailed me a pre-paid UPS label to ship it to Forth Worth. The service rep also cleared with me the possibility of a swap to a new comparable system as well as the need to image-copy my current drive contents to a new one. Turnaround time is 7 to 14 days...which really isn't bad...
Lessons learned so far: bad drives happen...don't freak out, but be sure to back up your data no matter what computer you are using. I typically back up my most important stuff to Dropbox and/or to a 1TB NAS I have attached to my home network, so really I didn't have anything irreplaceable on the new laptop. Next lesson: make sure if you're buying 'puter gear on places like e-bay or reseller sites that you have warranties for the items you are buying (in this instance I bought an open-box item that had not been registered with the manufacturer yet and still had the full warranty intact - not to mention a reasonable return policy from the e-bay seller). In this particular example, things have worked exactly as they did if I'd bought this laptop from a big box store, such as Best Buy or Wal-Mart (in fact Samsung even lists e-bay as a store location when I registered the laptop - again, kudos to Samsung). Third lesson: try to always have another connection to the internet available - i.e. don't rely on a single computer/tablet/phone for internet service. When your tech goes bad, you need the 'net to research fixes and, as in this case, to quickly contact service and repair.
Interestingly this may also make me more seriously consider moving toward SSD drives vs. HDDs. My new 'puter came with a 16GB SSD cache which has been pretty awesome to see so far (if anything the laptop boots lightning fast). SSDs, while being more expensive at the moment, have no moving parts to fry and arguably are more stable and reliable that HDDs...plus the aforementioned speed factor is pretty significant. So we shall see...
Will update more on the repair process overall as they progress...
Peace...
M.D.
@michaeldunkle
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