On Tuesday 14 May 2002 08:53, dibb_jim@emc.com wrote:
Regarding the IDE hard drive going bad... can you elaborate more on the symptoms?
I've been trying to track down system instability on one of my systems which is running *cough* XP pro. I think I've traced it down to a bad hard drive, but I'm curious what symptoms you were seeing. Thanks.
At first, I was seeing random lockups (about one every two weeks). Sure, that could have been alot of things - bad memory, hot CPU, etc. I checked for all of these but found no problems. The failure seemed to only occur under load, so I ran 6 simultaneous Seti@Home jobs (on a 2 cpu machine), but then it refused to fail. One day, however, the disk started logging uncorrectable errors in the /var/log/messages file just before it locked up. It got bad enough that I had to work hard to recover a ReiserFS partition on that drive (did you know that ReiserFS has an fsck program? I do now!). I copied the data off of the drive, reformatted it, and put the data back. It worked fine for about 2 weeks, and then it got really bad (but still logging errors). I replaced the drive and have had no problems since. It was a 3 year old Seagate IDE drive (a little young by my standards and experience). Now, I have nothing but SCSI hard drives (I have yet to lose one of these, but I know that nothing lasts forever). Later, Andy -- Andy Stewart, Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA USA http://www.wlug.org