indiboi.com

Well… I’m learning to loathe this message:

The problem has occurred looks like a hardware problem. If you have bad blocks, we advise you to get a new hard drive, because once you get one bad block that the disk drive internals cannot hide from your sight,the chances of getting more are generally said to become much higher (precise statistics are unknown to us), and this disk drive is probably not expensive enough for you to you to risk your time and data on it. If you don’t want to follow that follow that advice then if you have just a few bad blocks, try writing to the bad blocks and see if the drive remaps the bad blocks (that means it takes a block it has in reserve and allocates it for use for of that block number). If it cannot remap the block, use badblock option (-B) with reiserfs utils to handle this block correctly.

Even though I’ve had success with copying everything on my mp3 drive (YAY!!) thus far the first of the two 40GB drives is still failing, but, ehhh… thankfully they are not nearly as important.

Later… The second drive 40GB drive exhibits the same errors as the first 40GB drive, bleh, I can’t really remember what was on them though, so I guess they are not so important. I mean, I know they held the backups of the mp3s, so that’s unnecessary at this point, but… what else did they store? Oh well…

I requested and received the RMA for both of the 40GB drives. I just need to dig out the packing material and get them sent off, of course, errm, yeah.

The 60GB drive is out of warranty, even though it was manufactured later, they must have changed the warranty period after that or something, bastards. Just for “shits and giggles” I attached that drive to the fileserver again, curiously the fsck worked and found no errors. I was even able to mount it, and thus far it is actually working without reporting I/O errors to the system log.

Hmmmmm…. temporary malfunction? Or am I being given some sort of karmic grace period for data retrieval? Maxtor’s drive utility DID give an error code and DID say the drive was failing, so I’m not going to risk just using the drive even if it appears to be working.

It’ll be ‘fun’ trying to find 50GB of storage now that I’m down 3 drives, but I’m going to do my best to get all the data off that drive tonight, the more I save the less work required to rebuild my music archive.

I’m hoping, provided I can successfully capture the data on the failing 60GB drive that I’ll also be able to rescue data from the two 40GB drives. I’ll just need to buy another large drive very, very soon so I can actually have a place to put all this data.

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.

Paypal has been borked most of the day. I was able to login and check my balance this morning (around 7:30AM) before leaving for Baltimore, not suspecting any sort of problem. I did note the new homepage they’ve been talking about, and might I say it is hideous and stupid, but that is beside the point.

When I arrived back home I wanted to check on things before leaving again, but couldn’t login, couldn’t even get to the website for that matter. A couple of hours ago and it still wasn’t working, I stopped using the debit card this afternoon because I couldn’t verify my funds… the sort of thing I do all the time between shopping trips, just to make sure that the money I think I have, well, making sure I actually do have it in there… automatic things and other random shit can cause problems. There was also that little incident last month where $60 reversed out because my brother used the wrong bank account to send me a payment, heh, of course I’d get an email about that sort of insanity.

Anyway, I used my debit card around 5PM at Walmart to get coffee & an airwick refill, something like seven dollars, so no biggie, I didn’t give any thought to debit cards not working if the website stopped working.

Apparently Paypal entire system is now rather intensely fucked up. I discovered this after I decided to look around online to find out what the hell is happening. Major outages in the hours upon hours level is unheard of when dealing with such huge companies; redundancy is the rule, not the exception. There are all sorts of rumors circulating, ranging from DDoS, being hacked because of security flaws in the new homepage, and the quasi-official line of system glitches with software unrelated to the new homepage… sure, I believe that.

It also seems that Paypal has essentially locked ALL accounts, or at least that’s what I’m reading, and we all know to believe everything we read on the internet, lol. Tons of people on the Ebay forums are reporting their debit cards are dead… declined for everything. I sure as hell am glad that didn’t happen to me today, because my debit card was the only thing I was going to be using for my little trips to Towson Town Center and IKEA… if I’d have been declined at IKEA because the Paypal system was fuxored, well, that would have made my entire trip totally worthless. While Baltimore isn’t super far away, it’s a good three hours roundtrip when dealing with beltway traffic (something nearly constant since there is construction on the beltway these days).

I’ve been a little hard on myself for “spending money like water” …especially after the trip to Philly this past weekend, but now, in light of this paypal situation, I’m kind of glad the balance is so painfully low, lol, irony… being happy I’m broke. Of course I get payments through Paypal nearly everyday, so if this continues I’m going to be a bit screwed, either the money will still go into the account and I’ll not be able to use it, or I won’t get the money at all, lose-lose situation.

Related, in the financial sense, but not to Paypal, my bank charged me $40 in “excess transaction fees” recently for moving my money from savings to checking too often…. what the hell is that about? It seems an online transfer of funds is considered a check, and you can’t be writing checks out of your savings account… that’s what a checking account is for, duh. That’s a serious flaw in the system right there… I should be allowed to move money however often I want. It seems that such restriction was not in place when I opened the accounts years ago, online banking didn’t even exist at the time (with them), and somehow, amazingly, I’ve never done more than six transactions. I called my branch manager and she fixed it right away (refunded the fees), and we had a little chat about it. It’s truly stupid and she agrees with me (or at least feigned agreement), but I guess there’s nothing we can really do. I just need to remember not to make more than six transfers a month… easy enough, it was those little $25 moves so I’d not ‘accidently’ spend $100 at Walmart when I only went for $10 worth of shit. From talking with the branch manager it seems that quite a few people have run into this ‘excess transaction’ problem just like I did, and for the same reasons — keeping money in savings as a way of staying on budget and not overspending.

Here’s a note to self and others… French toast made with whole wheat bread is sort of, eh, yucky.