Re: [gentoo-user] Re: USB drive dead? (Commands to check?)

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 3:24 AM, Stroller
<stroller@××××××××××××××××××.uk> wrote:
>
> On 20 Sep 2009, at 01:01, Mark Knecht wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 4:48 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann
>> <volkerarmin@××××××××××.com> wrote:
>> <SNIP>
>>>>
>>>
>>> seriously, I think you should try to get off everything you want to keep
>>> - and
>>> then replace the disk with a new one. If a disk starts throwing block
>>> errors
>>> it will only become worse. Don't worry about 'repairing' the file system
>>> as
>>> long as there is hardware damage. Try to get off the disk as much as
>>> possible -
>>> and then scrap it.
>>
>> I suspect you're right. It's just another $100 to go buy a new one....
>>
>> Anyway, I'll see what I can set up to save the files that are still there.
>
>
> Although he seems to be demonstrating in this thread an inability to snip
> long sections of quoted text, leaving the reader with many lines of
> irrelevance to scroll through, I agree with Volker.
>
> If the drive fails you're going to be spending $100, anyway. If it fails
> without having been replaced & your data pulled off it then you could find
> yourself floating down Effluent River and unable to start your outboard.
>
> I think this drive is quite likely to fail catastrophically, from my
> experience of having seen similar errors in the past. I really wouldn't
> trust this drive with important data right now. If you get your data off it
> and replace it in it's current capacity, there's nothing stopping you using
> it as a secondary drive in the future; I wouldn't trust it with important
> data right now, but if it's still chugging away in 6 months time then you
> can probably begin to have faith in it. Once you've gotten your data off the
> drive it wouldn't do any harm to format it nice with a clean filesystem; and
> writing a bunch of big unimportant files on the drive (e.g. `dd if=/dev/zero
> of=/mnt/sda1/foo`) might allow it to map away a bunch of bad sectors.
>
> But right now you should probably act like the drive is definitely hosed. I
> don't think you should be saying "oh, this might cost me $100, I hope it
> doesn't" - you should be saying "s#!t d@mn! I had to buy a new hard-drive.
> But at least my data's ok".
>
> But maybe data isn't as important to you as it is to me. Relying on this
> drive for the backups of your Windows machines right now would be a mockery;
> around here sod's law would conspire for me to need one of those backups,
> were I to continue using a drive showing errors like this. I write as a guy
> you just bought yet another 500gb drive on Friday; I would too have
> preferred not to spend that money, but experience shows that frugality can
> sometimes be a mistake.
>
> Stroller.
>

Turns out none of the backup or Myth files were savable in any
practical manner of speaking. Myth could play them, or at least start
playing them - I don't know if it could get to the end of any of them,
but if I tried to copy them off to another drive the machine just
started hanging with lots of dmesg drive errors. None of the previous
windows backups were savable. I've taken new windows backups starting
last night.

The failing drive is now off line and the family will just have to
live with less Myth recording time. I've switched to an old, slow 80GB
1394 drive vs the newer 160GB USB2 drive that failed.

I guess this now comes down to having no backup for my backup system.
;-) Saving anything on hard drives always results with this risk I
suppose. My daily backups are 1-2 GB in total so I guess I could start
writing DVDs or something like that.

Thanks to all for your inputs and ideas.

Cheers,
Mark