Hitachi Notebook from Japan

This is a small laptop computer from Hitachi with an Intel Celeron 300 processor, 2GB Hard Disk Drive (HDD), and 64MB Ram. You can power-up the machine by pulling the slide power button at the right side, great... the unit showed up Hitachi logo and do some power-on-self-test i also heard the HDD spinning. Fortunately, it's still alive it boots up but there is no Operating System installed. Time to check the disk, too bad... the utility reports a bad sector near the very beginning of the disk or near the track zero - meaning the Drive is unusable. I tell the owner the status of the laptop and told her that we must replace the hard drive to put their pc back to work. But she doesn't want to spend much for it, so i made a decision, i dragged it home with me to see what i could do to fix it.

At home i started to make some debugging on the drive first, then do low-level formatting. After that, i proceed on marking the bad sectors. Even though the drive is only 2GB in size and the damage is on the beginning of the disk, i decided to broke it into two partitions to isolate the good to bad clusters. Formatting the drive is so smooth, now is the time to install an OS hmm... what do you think is the best, i have the following options in my mind - Linux, nope they aren't going to use it for hacking. WindowsXp, well the unit's hardware can't handle that OS. WindowsNT, not ideal for home use. Windows98, the disk is damaged so we should minimize the disk space usage. Windows95.... YES! I guess this one is the best. First, an ease of use and second to minimize workloads for the damaged drive, so i prefer Windows95! As expected, i spent a couple of hours installing windows. But i feel great because it install and run the OS smoothly.