Greetings all;

I went to town this afternoon an bought another HD to replace the one that went read-only about 6 weeks back, an event that started this whole dog & pony show.

Got it home, had some din-din, and came in here to install it, where it is a 2T Toshiba sata6 drive. Pulled it out of the sack, reached for pocket knife to cut box seal. Already cut...

Pull out foam tray, static bag has alo been ripped open. Practice 15 minute non-repeating profanity explosion, but bag still open. So, find out what I have, plug it into the sdb slot in the cage & boot up again. Issue smartctl -a -d ata /dev/sdb. Smartctl not found. Synaptic says smartmontools not installed, and I'd swear it was. Install again.

Drive has about 90 hours on it, with 34 spinups, so by now its obvious somebody had it out & could not make it work & returned it. So. still curious as to what the heck I have, its now doing a -t=long and won't be done for a couple hours.

But I now have no sound, and the usual culprits say it is not muted. I've not had to battle with sound in 3 or 4 years, so ATM I have no clue where to start.

So use my fingers and perhaps aplay or alias to see where its broken. And attempt to do something with it in TCC, results on the save progress bar repeating infinitely till a ctl+c is issued.

So, whats next? One could say that with no sound, I am all ears. :)

Thanks all.

Cheers, Gene Heskett