Quoting [EMAIL PROTECTED] ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > IBM Deskstar 60GXP, 40 Gig, 7200rpm. [...] I recommend that anyone > with a IBM drive models 60, 75, or 120 GXP, buy a replacement > drive....
Yeah, that particular series has a bad reputation. _Generally_ however, the IBM Deskstar and Ultrastar series have been very good. > Except for the 40 or so bad blocks all of the data on his drives have > been extracted and transfered to one of the replacement drives he > purchased. Typically, the only thing you care about is data files and maybe dotfiles & configuration files. Accordingly, you can ignore and blow away everything else, including all program files. (You _did_ keep master tarballs of software installed locally in /usr/local/src, right? Those you'd want to preserve.) > There appears to have been some minor file loses on the Redhat system. > In particular gpanel has lost it's default config file that controls > the lower panel. rpmverify appears to find about 100 discrepancies > on the filesystem.... But those would be classics in the "I don't care" department, right? I mean, you're going to reinstall all program files onto a replacement drive, and those will come from installation media. > Unfortunately I don't think this recovery process is very economical. > It took about 12 hours from start to finish. Even if nothing had gone > wrong it would have taken at least 6 hours or so to recover 40 Gigs of > data. Well, but I'd expect that you only need _care_ about a tiny fraction of those files. > The distribution was Redhat 7.2, ext3 filesystems which were configured > to *never* do a file system check. Both mount count and day count based > checks were both disabled. Boy, _that's_ an eye-opener. However, closer attention to patterns of errors in /var/log/messages would have caught the failure pattern sooner. I don't know if logcheck watches for those, but I'll bet it could be made to do so if it doesn't by default. > The hard drive was making slight noises when error messages appeared. Lesson, there: Your ears are a vital system-diagnostic tool. Pay attention to the sounds coming from your system, folks. > The initial plan was to use dd_rescue(2) to pull off all the partitions > off the failing IBM drive... You know, on a quiescent system (single-user), just "cp -ax" on modest sized directory trees, one at a time, will more than suffice. No need to muck about with cpio, tar, gzip, bzip2, etc. > The initial DMA problems with this new disk seemed to appear when the > CD drive was spinning up... there were two main power lines from the > power supply, as I write this I wonder if the CD was connected to > the same power connector as that new dead drive. You know, a _lot_ of "hard drive" problems in my experience turn out to be caused by flaky, weak, and/or overstressed power suplies. That's why I always use PC Power & Cooling power supplies in my system, if I can. I literally yank out and put in a corner the cheapo Taiwanese unit provided with the case, and put in the PC Power & Cooling one. Worth the $100. Among other things, it can save your nice expensive hard drive: When power supplies fail, about half the time they take hard drives with them. Some OEMs like the "Sparkle" brand. I have no comment on the merits of those. > First I tried the LinuxCare Bootable Business CD, 1.2 (which is very > old at this point). The old Linuxcare project has morphed into the Linuxcare Bootable Toolkit, v. 2.0. I have a bunch of them, but haven't had occasion to use them because the LNX-BBC 1.618 disc is so very good that I don't need anything else. But I hear good things about the LBT. (I'm in the credits on both forks. Not that I did a lot, but I was involved in the early stages.) > I need to get one of those updated BBC based CDs to carry around. Well worth the download: http://www.lnx-bbc.org/download.html (The NTFS support is still problematic because the Linux kernel driver is likewise. I have no experience with using it.) > I think I don't like LABELs. I _know_ I don't. Looks to me like nothing but problems. I think I know what they were trying to do, and it's just a bad call. -- Cheers, Rick Moen Emacs is a decent operating system, [EMAIL PROTECTED] but it still lacks a good text editor. _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
