[mythtv-users] Dieing Hard Drive

[Rich Hall]

Hi Nathan,

Nathan Ford reportedly babbled:
> So one of my hard drives is dying, or maybe it finally has died and
> I'm just unwilling to admit to the fact. It's a 120Gb WD 7200 non
> special Edition. Ironically enough this is my newest drive. I have
> older drives still running fine.
>
> Anyways, The drive started making horrible clicking noises. not
> wanting to further any damage I hastily shut-down and removed it.
> Since I've hooked it back up to try and get the files off of it. The
> horrible clicking has stopped, and I can see some of the directory
> structure, but when I go to try and copy a file it just errors.
>
> I ran WD's tools in an attempt to fix the drive, it ran for awhile
> before erroring out because of "too many errors".
>
> Dunno if anyone has any words of wisdom as to how I may recover this
> drive. The files on it aren't crucial, but it would be kinda
> depressing to lose em.
>
> I realize this this is off-topic as it's not directly myth-related,
> and for that I apologize. I'm just looking for a little glimmer of
> hope before I give up.
>
> (I was using part of the drive to store myth files, but I also had
> other stuff on there)
>
> --Zims

Sigh... I fell down and I can't get up... Or.. How many times do people need to hear
the line: "If it really is important.. back it up".

The only way to recover gracefully from such a situation as a hardware failure is to
not get into it.. Do regular backups or mirror the drives. Mirroring is easy on
Linux as you can do it in software or hardware. Hardware mirrors are best.. but
either scheme is better than not mirrored at all. A mirrored drive will allow you to
recover gracefully from a failure. Backups let you recover from a screwup or some
odd filesystem failure.

Oh.. yea.. don't waste your money on the cheap drives... especialy if you are not
going to mirror them. The Seagate or Maxtor drives are the only way to fly..
IBM/Hitachi are not too bad either.. But Samsung and WD are just plain trash.. that
is why they are so cheap.

-R
--
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 Rich Hall
 rich at netlynx.us
 http://www.netlynx.us/rich/
 ham radio: kf6arx
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 And remember - if it ain't broke, hit it again.