[TriLUG] Failing hard drives (laptops)

[T. Bryan]

Speaking of failing hard drives, I have an old thinkpad T23 that has started 
to lock up randomly.  Looking at the logs shows disk I/O errors, so I'm 
thinking that the drive is starting to go bad.  

Now, for my desktop machines, I always just buy parts separately, and I know 
how to track down compatability issues?  I've never really done any laptop 
hardware maintenance except upgrading RAM.  Are laptop hard drives generally 
compatiable?  IBM/Lenovo doesn't even keep information on the T23's 
compatibility with their current product selection, so I'm not sure how to 
guarantee that the laptop will be able to fit and read/write to some random 
vendor's "hard drive for mobile devices."  

Does anyone have experience with this?  

BTW, the laptop is happily running Debian sarge.  I'm planning to use g4u to 
ghost the drive (if I can get through the entire disk without fatal disk 
errors) to one of my desktop machines so that I can restore it to the new 
drive.  If anyone knows a better option, I'd love to listen to the voice of 
experience. :-)

---Tom