[lug] Drive failure signs was Hard Drive Manufacturer Suggestion

[Wagner, Carl]

If you had a sudden death drive, you may be able to recover the data
with the PCB off of a working drive of the same model.  I did that a
long time ago.  It worked well enough to get the files off.

Carl.

-----Original Message-----
From: lug-bounces at lug.boulder.co.us
[mailto:lug-bounces at lug.boulder.co.us] On Behalf Of Nate Duehr
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2004 10:58 AM
To: Boulder (Colorado) Linux Users Group -- General Mailing List
Subject: Re: [lug] Drive failure signs was Hard Drive Manufacturer
Suggestion

Mike Stanczyk wrote:

>With everyone sharing their hard drive horror stories and since I've 
>lost a drive this month too, I wanted ask what symtoms people saw 
>before their drive went to silcon heaven...
>
>Strange sounds?
>Error messages in which system log?
>Strange smells?
>
>Mike
>  
>
It started singing "Moon River" one evening.  Was real eerie to hear
that coming from the server in the basement.  ;-)

Seriously though, usually on the ones I've had go, the died in one of
two ways:
- Bearings started "screaming" while spinning, eventually the disk
didn't spin up or overheated and died.
- Server/system is power-cycled and the drive dies during the power
event and is forever dead.

The first scenario (not the singing!) is easy to spot, and gives plenty
of time to double check those backups you've of course already made... 
(snicker...)... or panic and back up the disc.  I usually pre-emptively
pull these noisy drives also, but I have a couple with non-sensitive
data on them that's backed up that have screamed along for years
(Seagate drives).  Noisy little beasts.  One of them is in an old Sun
Ultra 1 I goof around with.

The second scenario is deadly if there aren't backups.  In extreme cases
you could probably pay a data recovery service if you absolutely needed
something off that drive... the electronics died, but the data's
probably still fine on the platter(s).

Nate
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