Take your hands off the screen, it has been healed!
It's been a while since I last posted. I'll post a summary of my action-packed life in another entry, though. I need to start getting accustomed to writing, again - I'll explain in another post.
I've had the privilege of resurrecting my laptop's hard drive from the dead for the two days.
So I've known for a little while that the hard drive on my machine is probably on the way out. For the first couple of minutes after cold-booting the machine, the hard drive wouldn't really work. Once it warmed up, it'd work fine. Weird. So I basically left the machine on continuously and left it at work. I get in yesterday and linux is telling me that there's some kind of journal error on one of the partitions. Okay - reboot - won't boot. Oh crap. So I get a rescue CD, and boot that. To my utter shock, it looks like the /usr and /home partitions are perfectly fine. So I back up /home as fast as the network will allow (thank you for putting networking and scp on the rescue cd, fedora).
After the data's safe, I figure I'll see if I can figure out where the damage is, since the rest of the hdd seems okay. Turns out that only the first several blocks of the first partition are toast. It makes the partition completely unreadable (I don't really know filesystems, but I'm going to assume that critical FS structures hide out at the beginning of the partition). I'm pretty surprised that the partition table is intact, but I figure I'll go for broke. I repartition so that the first partition starts at the second cylinder on the drive, bypassing the bad area, and reformat. Seems to be okay. I figured since I had just blown away the linux install, I might as well upgrade to Fedora Core 4, so I install that. Actually works reasonably well. So I seem to have a working (for now) machine. The new OS is actually sort of nice, since the new Openoffice.org has support for an actual decent bibliography management program, and I really need one.
So, two questions. The partition table on an HDD is at the beginning, right? That's what I would think, but I find it weird that the damage near the beginning of the drive didn't take out the partition table too. Second, anyone willing to bet on when the drive will fail entirely? (Yeah, I'm going to get a new HDD, so I'm not SOL when it happens.
The only other thing is that I'm thankful for the recent drop in temps. Last week had highs in the mid-high 80's all week and lows in the upper 70's with nasty humidity. That's supposed to be reserved for the 3rd week in Aug in Wisconsin. But it's going to be a good weekend. We get to go jump in a lake.
I've had the privilege of resurrecting my laptop's hard drive from the dead for the two days.
So I've known for a little while that the hard drive on my machine is probably on the way out. For the first couple of minutes after cold-booting the machine, the hard drive wouldn't really work. Once it warmed up, it'd work fine. Weird. So I basically left the machine on continuously and left it at work. I get in yesterday and linux is telling me that there's some kind of journal error on one of the partitions. Okay - reboot - won't boot. Oh crap. So I get a rescue CD, and boot that. To my utter shock, it looks like the /usr and /home partitions are perfectly fine. So I back up /home as fast as the network will allow (thank you for putting networking and scp on the rescue cd, fedora).
After the data's safe, I figure I'll see if I can figure out where the damage is, since the rest of the hdd seems okay. Turns out that only the first several blocks of the first partition are toast. It makes the partition completely unreadable (I don't really know filesystems, but I'm going to assume that critical FS structures hide out at the beginning of the partition). I'm pretty surprised that the partition table is intact, but I figure I'll go for broke. I repartition so that the first partition starts at the second cylinder on the drive, bypassing the bad area, and reformat. Seems to be okay. I figured since I had just blown away the linux install, I might as well upgrade to Fedora Core 4, so I install that. Actually works reasonably well. So I seem to have a working (for now) machine. The new OS is actually sort of nice, since the new Openoffice.org has support for an actual decent bibliography management program, and I really need one.
So, two questions. The partition table on an HDD is at the beginning, right? That's what I would think, but I find it weird that the damage near the beginning of the drive didn't take out the partition table too. Second, anyone willing to bet on when the drive will fail entirely? (Yeah, I'm going to get a new HDD, so I'm not SOL when it happens.
The only other thing is that I'm thankful for the recent drop in temps. Last week had highs in the mid-high 80's all week and lows in the upper 70's with nasty humidity. That's supposed to be reserved for the 3rd week in Aug in Wisconsin. But it's going to be a good weekend. We get to go jump in a lake.