[SlugLUG] When Bad Hard Drives Happen to Good Linuxes

[cerise at armory.com]

Given that one of my drives had a similar problem not so long ago and it 
managed around 2 years of hard use as my media server, I tend towards agreement.

I haven't had any luck with SMART though.  I've never had an inkling that a 
problem was on the way using smartd, nor have I ever identified a problem from
querying SMART values after the fact.  Your mileage may vary.

It is, in any case, why running LVM with striping or an actual RAID is a
wise thing to do.

-Phil/CERisE

On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 12:46:01PM -0700, Thomas Leavitt wrote:
> 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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