HDD Failure of ‘06
It started off with random ticking, then the head of the drive started scraping the platters which closely resembled the sound of nails scraping on a chalkboard. I rebooted and tossed in Knoppix, booting off of a LiveCD would allow me to read the hard drives in read only and hopefully avoid any further data corruption while fsck’ing it. I quickly discovered that my efforts were futile.
I’ve had several hard drives fail on me in the past, but this is the first time I’ve had one fail on me while I was using it. My 80GB Western Digital hard drive was manufactured November 2001 and luckily only contained my root partitions. Although I have a pretty decent backup strategy, it was only then that I discovered that if my second hard drive, which contained my home directory, had failed I would have lost about five days of work.
I decided that a Fantom Titanium 320GB USB/Firewire external hard drive was a cheap investment. And with 320GB I wouldn’t have to update it anytime soon. My new backup strategy quietly sits under my desk, out of site, out of mind. This way it wont get stepped on or, worst case scenario, unlikely to be discovered in the event someone tries to rob my house.
After connecting the dive, Fedora automatically mounted it as FAT32. Why it was preformatted as FAT32 and not NTFS? I’m not sure but I don’t care as I planed on wiping it out and formatting it with ext3 anyways.
# umount /dev/sda1
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=64K
4883926+0 records in
4883925+0 records out
320072933376 bytes (320 GB) copied, 11148.3 seconds, 28.7 MB/s
# cfdisk /dev/sda
# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (8192 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done
# df -Th
/dev/sda1 ext3 294G 191M 279G 1% /media/disk