Fedora 12 / WD Scorpio Blue Laptop Install

I have a Lenovo Y510 laptop that I've had for a couple years now. It's a pretty nice machine - it came with the Vista operating system and, aside from creating a partition and installing Fedora 10 a while back, that is what it still had up until this week. This laptop is basically used for the occassional development activities along with of course checking email and surfing the internet. So the other day, I went to boot up the computer to check my email and ruh-roh, dead. Drive not passing hardware test. Click, click, click, click. Yeah, toast. After doing some brief shopping I decided to get a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 320 gigabyte drive to replace my dead Hitachi 120 gig Travelstar drive. 

When I started looking around at the 2.5" drives, one thing I noticed which may or may not have contributed to the early death of this drive, was that it had zero shock protection features. The WD Scorpio Blue drive has shock protection features, but unless you spend the extra $30 or so for the Scorpio Black drive - you aren't going to get the built in accelerometer feature. The accelerometer feature gives the drive the ability to park it's read head in less that 200ms should it detect that the laptop is being dropped. Pretty cool feature, but I opted for the Blue drive pretty much based on price. The performance of these two drives, according to the reviews that I looked at online, was so close overall that there would be no discernable difference. Just upgrading from the aging Hitachi drive and dumping Vista in favor of Linux should provide a nice little performance boost, so I didn't find the extra cost justifiable at this time.

My experience with Vista throughout the time that I had it was, well, less than satisfactory. Since much of the software development that I do is ultimately deployed to either a Red Hat Enterprise or CentOS Linux webserver, I figured Fedora might be a good choice. Not to mention that I have used Fedora in the past and found it to be pretty good overall. My reasoning here is that Fedora is very similar in many ways to CentOS and RHE - so working on it will be somewhat more familiar than alternative Linux flavors like openSUSE or Ubuntu - other Linux distros that I considered for this machine. Yes, this also means that Vista is going BYE BYE in favor of Fedora 12 Linux running Gnome. As I mentioned, I did consider other flavors of Linux - and really there wasn't one specific reason aside from my prior experience with it, the facts that my colleague Joseph uses it exclusively on his machines (read: nice reference resource), and that it shares many similarities to the production and development Linux environmentst that I already use.

First things first. Download the DVD install ISO off the Fedora website and burn an installation DVD. I downloaded directly and it took a looooong time. In hindsight, perhaps using the bitorrent would have been a better choice. Oh well - I got the ISO image and burned to disk. Fantastic.

My Saturday delivery of the WD Scorpio Blue Drive from Amazon didn't disappoint and arrived just before noon. I took it out of the package, screwed on the little cover/mounting tab thingy, and plugged it in. The Y510, like many laptops, has a separate door specifically for accessing the HDD, which made replacement of the drive a breeze. I proceeded to plug in the power and boot 'er up.

Of course, the first thing I wanted to do was to get into the bios, make sure the new drive was recognized in the IDE configuration section, and set the DVD drive to have the first boot priority. On the Y510, this is accomplished by simply pressing F2 at boot to get into the bios configuration screen. With that done, I inserted the ISO of Fedora 12 that I had made and re-booted the computer. As expected the installation disk took over and got me started. After the installation wizard finished checking the integrity of my Fedora 12 install DVD disc, the installation proceeded with a couple basic option choices and then the main installation process.

That's pretty much it. After about half of an hour of installation, my new hard drive now has a fresh install of Fedora 12 on it.