Disk Failure!

So it’s been a while since my last post and it’s interesting to see that I haven’t blogged since I entered the E2 program. I’m now done and it was indeed quite an adventure. I’ve leave out the details for anyone who is interesting in pursuing it, but be ready to be tired!

We’ve now moved back into the city and on a very loud and annoying street. I get to enjoy the sound of buses, random drunks, jack hammers and velociraptors.

So back to the nerding topics. Shazouty had an uber disk failure which made me a very sad panda and I potentially lost about 4 months worth of data /sadface. It turned out that having raid 0 is good and bad at the same time. I don’t know if this was just a bad batch of disks, a random anomaly or what. Regardless, one disk was silently failing with bad clusters. The raid was protecting the data by having it available on the other disk. However, the secondary disk was slowly degenerating as well. While both were sprouting full of bad sectors, they were in different sectors so one was protecting the data from the other. That happened until eventually both disks had a bad sector… on my file table. Additionally ReiserFS had apparently stop being a good choice… years ago.

So after trying ReiserFsck to death and booting off cd images over and over trying to squeeze off from the dying raid, I realized it was time to cut my losses and just learn from the lesson. Fortunately, some of the data was still on Bunny(Diana named our newest laptop) and Badbox, so it wasn’t a complete loss. I now have a monthly reminder to check the SMART data of the drives to check the bad sectors and also backup to an external drive.

While this nerdy info isn’t as programming nerdy as I’d like my poasts to be, I will try to make sure I have some interesting for the next post. In the mean time another youtube video.