On Freitag 26 Februar 2010, Mark Knecht wrote: > On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann > > <volkerar...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > On Freitag 26 Februar 2010, Mark Knecht wrote: > >> The machine _mostly_ crashed while running badblocks. I say mostly > >> because the mouse is still alive but I can no longer ssh in and cannot > >> open a terminal on my wife's desktop or get to the console. > > > > because it is not crashed but waiting for the ide timeouts. > > So if I let it continue running is it going to come back in the next > hour or two?
yes > I am assuming the IDE timeouts are because the drive is > having trouble, correct? That's the theory here? yes > If so then unless the software can mark them bad and somehow create good files out of bad > then I'm still left with a machine that is going to need serious work > done before it's a happy box again, correct? and with 'serious work' you mean 'replace the harddisk' ... > > On the other hand, because I have reasonably good user backups > (although no real system backups) right now if I bite the bullet and > build the machine then when my wife gets it back it's hopefully going > to be more reliable, wouldn't it? yes > > I'm thinking that maybe I just copy a little stuff off the box - /etc > and the like - and then boot the machine with the Gentoo install CD or > System Resuce CD and see what the drive is doing? you could do that. > > That doesn't cost me anything to look around, but if SMART won't turn > on and badblocks is suggesting the drive is having trouble maybe > running something like badblocks and actually __marking__ blocks as > bad and then reloading Gentoo would work in the long run? (A lot of > work though.) you would need to save the badblocks to a file, than feed that file to mkfs. And you are not even save - because when a drive starts to have bad blocks the chance that more are popping up some is pretty high. So you might be lucky and the drive is able to run for a long while (even maybe mapping out bad blocks while testing them - so always run badblocks twice), but you have at least a as a good chance that the whole thing starts over in a couple of weeks. > > I'm really not interested in buying new drive because the machine is > ATA100/133 and if it's not the drive then the money is wasted for a > new machine. The cheapest at NewEgg is about $40. Why spend the buck > for an old Intel Centrino machine? you could take the drive with you when you buy a new machine. Moving harddisks is not that hard. Or put it in an usb enclosure when you don't need it anymore. ide-usb enclosures are cheap.
