Question for the old hands, about disks

[gene heskett]

On Thursday, April 14, 2011 11:25:47 PM Duncan did opine:

> gene heskett posted on Wed, 13 Apr 2011 11:42:46 -0400 as excerpted:
> > As I have gone about preparing /dev/sdb to move the install to it, I
> > have had several instances where the machine was frozen, usually for
> > about 70 seconds at a time.  Dmesg is reporting that ata2 is being
> > reset, quite a few times.
> 
> In my experience, repeated minite-timeouts and reset is pre-fail
> behavior.  But with your mention of warranty, it sounds like you already
> know that.

Well, I hitched a ride over to seacrates site and picked up the latest 
firmware updating iso, this about 3 days ago, maybe 4, time has been a blur 
here since.

Following their instructions, I pulled the cables on the other drives and 
booted the cd I burnt.  It updated the firmware on that drive, to cc49, 
from some version in the late 20's.

So now the drive is stable, but the write speeds are running about 2 
megs/sec.  I replaced the SATA cable with another and doubled the from 
platter read speeds, but they still don't match the other nearly identical 
drive.  But its working with no errors now.

What pulled the plug and flushed the whole system was when I plugged in the 
cable to /dev/sda and booted the cd, it updated the firmware on it too, and 
somehow managed to also do the MBR on the drive so that even selecting it 
as the boot device in the F8 bios menu, it simply hung with a blank screen 
deadlock.  It is still that way despite fdisk showing it as bootable, and I 
have mounted the individual partitions and have the majority of the data 
recovered now.  But, that drives partition labels are meaningless & 
scrambled so that the partition bearing the sea-slash label, is actually, 
from its contents, the old /opt partition.  Other labels are similarly 
miss-placed.  Entirely possible since all the distros have fallen in love 
with the UUID numbers because they are supposedly more unique than a human 
generated label.

Anyway, I installed a freshly burnt version of pclos, and have been 
watching paint dry at 2megs/sec while mc gets my data back.

And yes, I run amanda, so it ought to be easy, but my next outgoing msg 
will be to the amanda-users list because I can't get it to build, missing 
includes bailouts.  With zero clues as to what the package name that would 
fix it.  And since the rpm packages are a totally different setup, I'll 
wait till the local build problems get sorted, its one of the few programs 
that I have been building and using the svn versions of since back in the 
late 90's.

Anyway, I haven't fallen over, yet, just occupied trying to get a new 
install that didn't use the partitions I gave it, sorted, but now I have 
/home, /opt, /root, and /var back on their proper partitions.

One positive side effect seems to be that a lot of my kde4 problems have 
vanished too.  And I think I have it all back to 4.6.2 now too.  As I've 
rebooted 20+ times as I get the data moved & the only time I lost any 
config was when I mounted the new /home partition over the top of the 
install directory and rebooted after fixing fstab.  But give me time, I'm 
sure I can screw it up again. :-)

Cheers, Duncan & now to see if my recovered kmailrc can still send an 
email.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
<http://tinyurl.com/ddg5bz>
<http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html>
Avoid the Gates of Hell.  Use Linux
(Unknown source)
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