Return of the Hard Drive Destruction Bunny

Guess who paid a little visit to Pixy Central in the small hours of the morning?

Yes! None other than that relentless hopping devourer of data, Hard Drive Destruction Bunny!

Of course, I'm running RAID-5, so my data is safe. Unless, of course, the bunny decides to make it a twofer.

And I have most of the files backed up on DVD-R. I can't actually read many of the DVDs, but it's comforting to know that they are there, and at least in theory I have a backup.

So, I did what I had been planning for this weekend: I threw all my spare parts together in one big messy server-shaped bundle, and installed Linux on it. All went well until it came time to reboot, whereupon the server came up with the dreaded

LI

Which means that although you've installed GRUB as your boot loader, BIOS has somehow found half of an ancient copy of LILO, attempted to boot that instead, and locked up.

Oh, and the Fedora installer won't let you do a quick fix on the boot loader. It will ask you exactly what changes you want to make - and then not do them.

So, I left it re-installing in the hope that this time (I limited the mirrored boot volume to the first two IDE drives) it will be able to find GRUB.

I've ordered another 200GB SATA drive. At least Linux knows what to do with them. (Huh. I tried to install WinXP on my Linux box so I could dual boot, but I couldn't get it to work. Maybe that's why.)

I've also got a 200GB drive here at work. It's destined to replace the pathetically overcrowded 20GB drive in my workstation here, but it's going on a little detour first. You see, I have 580GB of files on my new Linux box, but the parts-bin server only has 440GB... Which would make backing up one onto the other kind of tricky. (We have spare disks all over the place at work, because every time we build a server we make sure we have a spare disk of the exact same model in case we need to replace a failed drive in a hurry. Which is great if you need to borrow a disk for a day or two... Not so good if someone else has borrowed the disk you need right now.)

Oh, and while I was building the parts-bin server I managed to knock out both the power cord for my mail server and the phone line for my ADSL. I blame that on lack of sleep, which is another story entirely.

So, all I need to do is:

Get Linux installed and working on the server of many names (for historical reasons, the parts-bin server will be called Lina Kodachi Akane Shampoo Mughi Pixy Misa Dot Kicks-Ass Dot Net).

Copy all the little fiddly files (millions of them - literally) from Yuri to the main RAID array on Lina.

Install the borrowed 200GB drive in Kei.

Copy the anime from Yuri to the borrowed drive in Kei until I run out of room.

Copy any remaining files to the other RAID array on Lina.

Install the new 200GB drive in Yuri.

Reinstall Yuri from scratch, only with a spare volume for the raidset.

Copy all the anime and other critical files back to Yuri.

Bask in the glow of all the happy disk drives.

The funny thing is, the drive isn't actually dead. Not as such. It doesn't seem to be performing up to spec, but I can read from it. But Linux has decided it's bad, and won't be told otherwise.

Now, I probably could just reimport that disk into the raidset somehow, but I've never done that before, and it is very much one slip, you're dead territory, which is not a place I care to go while juggling 580GB of data.

I may have come up with a way to read those unreadable DVD-Rs too. More details tonight - one way or the other.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:02 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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