[NBLUG/talk] More hard drive problems

[Walter Hansen]

Just an idea. I've been playing with rare earth magnets lately. Cheap at
HSC. I suppose a coulpe of those randomly placed arround the drive while
it was doing a reformat or some other drive intensive work would mess it
up rather peramently with no obvious trama.

> On Monday 03 October 2005 01:39 pm, Kyle Rankin wrote:
>> Unless I'm misunderstanding you, that's basically what I meant by saying
>> you need 2 new drives--one to replace your failed drive, and a new one.
>
> I think I get it.  And, yes, I was thinking the same thing as you; I just
> didn't realize it was the same thing.
>
> However, I ran Maxtor's PowerMax utility on the hard disk earlier today,
> and
> it was able to somehow repair the problem (!).  I'm not exactly sure how,
> but
> I'm going to see if the disk is usable again (I'll run one more surface
> scan
> while running Linux, rebuild the partition table, and reattach the disk to
> the RAID array).
>
>
> So, in summary, what happened was:
>
> * The hard disk failed, taking the partition table and swap partition with
> it.
> My computer apparently crashed when it tried to use the damaged swap space
> (I
> say "apparently" because the monitor, keyboard, and mouse froze up, but
> there
> was still a flurry of disk activity until I finally decided to hit the
> "reset" button 15 minutes later).  Needless to say, I am now skeptical of
> this hard disk, and I will NOT use it for swap space.
>
> * When the computer restarted, the RAID array housing my /home directory
> failed to start because a drive was missing.  At first it looked like
> there
> might have been filesystem errors due to the crash (which shouldn't have
> been
> possible), but those errors resulted from the array being offline (and
> reiserfsck wasn't smart enough to figure out that it was trying to scan an
> inactive RAID array).  Ultimately, I only needed to figure out which mdadm
> commands to issue in order to start the array using the drives that did
> work.
>
> * Since Maxtor won't accept a warranty exchange without an error code from
> their PowerMax utility to tell them the precise nature of the error, I
> modified /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf so that the array would start automatically
> without the defective hard disk (I saved a copy of the original so I can
> easily switch back), then shut down Linux and booted from the PowerMax
> disk.
> After doing an "Advanced scan", PowerMax said that it could attempt to
> repair
> the damage (I think it just re-mapped the damaged sectors so that they'd
> be
> invisible to the OS; thus the usable space on the disk will now be
> somewhat
> smaller, and I won't be surprised if more bad sectors appear).  The data
> on
> the bad sectors was unrecoverable, but since the entire contents of the
> disk
> amounted to a swap partition and part of a RAID5 array, that didn't
> matter.
>
>
> This may sound kind of demented (and perhaps it is), but I'm now kind of
> hoping that the disk will fail completely before the end of the year.
> Why?
> Because I'm sure that it will fail eventually, and I purchased this hard
> drive on January (can't remember the exact date), and if it fails within a
> year of the date of purchase, I can get it replaced for free (and my use
> of
> RAID5 negates any chance that its future failure will cause any actual
> data
> loss).  Since this particular problem was fixable, I don't think I have a
> case for a warranty replacement at this time.
>
>
> --
> Lincoln Peters
> <sampln at sbcglobal.net>
>
> Shah, shah!  Ayatollah you so!
>
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