This is not supposed to happen.
I was sitting here, not really sure at this point what I was doing because I dropped it all, and I heard one of the most scary noises one can hear coming from my local fileserver. *Grate* *Click* *Click* *Grate*
Oh shit…
A/C off, TV off, as silent as it can be with two computers running full bore. *Click* *Grate* *Grate* *Click*
I try to access HDC on the fileserver, while simultaneously tailing the message log… I’m seeing “Drive not ready seek complete error,” I’m seeing i/o errors, I’m seeing DMA errors… Oh shit. The SMB Browser is lagging, causing all of Gnome to lag… HDC isn’t loading.
HDC is my mp3 archive… 60GB of music I’ve collected since the dawn of my owning a cdrom drive.
I realize that I’m not an idiot, I back my data up… to other drives. I take precautions against drive failure, if need be I could pull the data off the drive — if possible — and store it elsewhere until I can replace the drive.
I do something utterly foolish and reboot the fileserver. It could be that the DMA setting or some sort of background daemon is interfering somehow, even though I know that is unlikely.
I type “df -h” and see not only HDC missing, but HDF, and HDE are ALSO missing from the list.
Take a guess at what HDF and HDE are used for?
….backing up the mp3s on HDC.
This cannot happen, a failure of three drives at the same time. HDE and HDF are identical, manufactured on the same day, same model, exactly. All three drives are Maxtor, a company I have come to rely upon for quality; I use no other brand of drive… with the exception of that in my iBook and workstation where I did not personally choose the brand.
Two of the three drives are still under warranty, of course, with the failure of these drives it means that I have lost two thirds of my mp3 collection… easily. The only remaining “backup” is that of my iPod. I a t least know that unless something has happened to it also, that I still have all of my favorite music.
If I were overly paranoid I might just say that there’s some sort of conspiracy going on here… what a coincidence that three harddrives containing mp3s suddenly stop working, the RIAA blew up my fileserver (and, no, it is not open to the public, do you think I’m totally insane?).
I was hoping that perhaps the IDE controller had failed… but that wouldn’t explain why HDD was still working. HDE & HDF are also on the same controller, perhaps it had failed… perhaps the cables had suddenly shorted or broken, snapped, whatever.
I swapped cables, I swapped power plugs, I swapped the controllers that each drive uses… no luck, same errors, same lack of ability to mount… bad magic number errors, bad superblock errors… fsck tells me flat out that the drives are failing and to throw them away. It’s a lost cause.
I go to Maxtor’s support website and remember they require their diagnostic app to be run against any drives that RMA would be requested for… I open the side of my workstation and one by one run the diags on each drive. Each drive shows failure.
The vast majority of those mp3s, well, I COULD re-rip… I have the actual cds… still, of course finding them, well, that’s another story. SO, uhm…. yeah, I’m so royally fucked. I know I had other stuff on one of the drives… but I honestly can’t remember what it was at this point, movies perhaps… or maybe it was one of my empty drives… who knows. I can say though that I still have all my porn (haha) and I do have the vast majority of my movies still available on the 120GB drive… *Sigh*
And, really, the week hadn’t been going too badly, with the exception of… quite a lot actually, err… I guess the freelance job, and the prospect of getting paid quite handsomely sort of overrode the bad shit, and the paypal problem seems to be fixed… oh well, at least I can buy a new drive; of course I already figured out what I was buying with my freelance money, fuck again.
