Hi Grant, on Thursday, 2007-01-25 at 08:20:37, you wrote: > I successfully wrote an iso of some important files after booting up > normally (minus hald, X, and vi) so that's good. Is there a utility I > can run on the disk to see if there is permanent damage? Should I try > re-emerging packages that are having trouble or should I try to emerge > -e world?
As Thomas said, use the manufacturer's tools. Maybe smartmontools if
you don't have anything more specialized.
> I suppose I should see if I can write and burn iso's of everything in
> /home/grant/ right away. Is there a good way to get a bunch of data
> into multiple iso's that are each no larger than 650MB? Also, I've
> read man mkisofs and experimented before with trying to preserve
> filenames perfectly but it never comes out quite right. Can anyone
> recommend mkisofs options for preserving filenames perfectly?
I'd recommend trying it over a network or USB/IEEE1394 to another disk
if at all possible. If the HD is dying anyway, writing ISOs to it while
reading many files from another region of the disk at the same time will
kill it very quickly. Same thing with a damaged file system: the more
you write, the greater the damage. I'd try to connect an external HD or
export a partition on some machine on the net, mount the partition
read-only and back it up using tar. Then it's at least reformat/restore
if not swap HD/format/restore.
good luck!
Matthias
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