[SlugLUG] When Bad Hard Drives Happen to Good Linuxes

[Thomas Leavitt]

In my experience, your typical cheap ass Fry's ATA hard drive has a life
expectancy of well under two years under any type of serious load.
Backups and redundancy are essential in that scenario, as is monitoring
how close to kicking the bucket the damn thing is with smartd.

Thomas

Peter Belew wrote:
> Hi -
>
> On 10/2/06, Eric Carter <Ecnassianer at greenstorm.net> wrote:
>   
>> So my recent install of Ubuntu ended rather catastrophically. I came out of
>> my room early in the morning to the sound of a very tiny sword coming out of
>> a very tiny sheath over and over again. It was coming from my computer...
>> from the drive I installed Ubuntu on.... my computer wouldn't wake up... I
>> powered it off and went to work.
>>
>> When I got enough time to deal with the situation with the care and
>> compassion that I desire my computers to be dealt with I found that the
>> drive boots up and seems fine, but occasionally makes evil noises. The drive
>> is on my desk, and I've had no indication of data failure. I'd like to
>> salvage all the work I put into getting Ubuntu set up. A new (HUGE!) drive
>> is on it's way. What's the easiest way to salvage my Ubuntu install when it
>> arrives?
>>     
>
> I would get ahold of a USB drive or another networked computer and
> backup your home directory (-ies) and other data (including any
> config files that were a lot of work to set up, and datbases) ASAP.
>
> Then reinstall from scratch on the new drive, and restore your data.
>
> I typically use a separate /home partition, on the theory that this
> facilitates the future installation of a different distro, etc.
>
> Peter
>   
>> Partition table looks something like this:
>> ~1 Gig Swap
>> ~29 Gigs EXT 3 Maps to: /
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>> EC
>>
>>
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>>
>>     
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