18 Jun 05 Hard drives suck and then you die
So I ordered a new hard drive for my server about a week ago. It was about time to upgrade, actually I should have done it long ago but hard drives make a large dent in your wallet. It arrived on Friday which made me happy since I would have the entire weekend to install it, little did I expect that a 10min job would actually eat up most of Friday night and the entire Saturday.
The idea was to replace my Western Digital Caviar 80GB drive with my brand new Maxtor 200GB drive, retire the old 30GB IBM drive and replace it with the Caviar, a perfect plan. I’ve had the Caviar for 2-3 years and the main reason I went with that model was because it came highly recommended from several sources that I trusted. It served my home directory on the server as well as the Subversion and CVS repositories. The IBM drive hosted my root partition and it was getting really crammed since I also kept the web root and some other things on it.
By now I think most of you have figured out what has happened to me, and if you haven’t I’m about to get to the point so don’t worry. Before we get down to the gory details I would like to point out that if there are two things I trust in my server it’s the motherboard, a trusty Tyan Tiger S1834 which have yet to cause me a single problem, and the WD Caviar which, like I said, came highly recommended.
I powered down the server like any sane admin would do before replacing an IDE drive and continued on to mounting the new Maxtor drive. My plan was to migrate all data on the Caviar to the Maxtor, repartition the Caviar and then migrate my server from the IBM to the Caviar. Now, unlike an actual system administrator working for some company with lots of money I cannot afford a lot of redundancy, in fact, all the redundancy I could afford was to run daily backups of my CVS and Subversion repositories as well as my personal mail. Like I pointed out earlier these were stored on the Caviar so naturally backups were made to the IBM drive and with a measly 30GB drive which was already holding a lot of other stuff and factoring in that I didn’t own a DVD-burner until recently you can understand why I chose to limit the backups to just these three things. Back to the story, after having mounted the new drive, I went on to booting my server. I pressed the power button and all of a sudden I hear this weird clicking noise coming from one of my hard drives, naturally I blamed the new drive. Quickly I proceeded to turn the power off, ensured that all cables were actually connected properly and then turned power back on again, the clicking noise did not go away. The BIOS screen popped up (yes, my server is a PC unless you didn’t realize this back when I was talking about it being a Tyan motherboard) and to my shock only the IBM and Maxtor drives were detected! The clicking went on a couple of more times and then I could hear the drive spin down and the clicking stopped. I rebooted once more but the process repeated itself exactly like the first time around. I was starting to panic, but I thought/hoped that it could be a problem with the IDE controller on the motherboard, I can always replace a motherboard but replacing a hard drive with data on it is a whole different ballpark. Again, no matter which channel I used same story.
I feel that this story is already long enough so I’m going to just cut to the conclusion right now, besides, it’s getting late and I do want to get some sleep after this terrible day.
The Caviar is dead, no question about it. With the exception of my CVS and Subversion repositories and personal mail, thank god!, I have lost a lot of things. I’m still trying to recall what I was actually keeping on the drive that I might miss. One thing I do remember and that I now have lost (unless by some miracle the hard drive would come back to life) are all of my pictures that I took at Smart Networks Developer Forum Europe.
So what have I learned from this horrible experience?
Making backups are great, and I love hdup, without it I would have lost everything, now I just lost some important files but far from all of it. I would especially like to thank Mikael Karlsson for introducing me to hdup in the first place. From now on I’m going to make backups on DVD-RW at a more regular interval and restructure my file system a bit so that I have better control over what is actually getting backed up. Never again am I going to blindly trust a hard drive no matter how good someone says it is, hard drives suck.
In the end things could have been a lot worse. I have accepted the fact that I lost some things that cannot be replaced and others that can and even though it’s been a bad day a new one starts tomorrow and then another and another until eventually I will never have to worry about something as silly as data stored on a hard drive ever again.
Peace out.
Similar Posts:
Reader's Comments
Leave a Comment
That’s one of my nightmares. That one day, all my disks are going to die, and I’ll be left without everything I did. Ever. Sure, I do my backup — but as most people know, you backup after something bad happends
— my commercial work is backuped by me, twice and once by sysadmin. But everything else is.. hmm.. rather not secure.
What can I say? ,,Don’t take life too seriously, you won’t get out alive.” ;D
thanks dave
no I have to read your blog every time.. and soon it is time for a new episode of beauty and the geek..
opi said : “my commercial work is backuped by me, twice and once by sysadmin.”
should be :
“my commercial work is backuped by me, twice.”
@kierzko:
lol
Well, the drive died because you handled it roughly. Probably you bumped it just a little bit while removing/reinserting. That was enough. Some drives are damn fragile and if you hear a metallic “ding” from them hitting anything, even lightly, chances are you can kiss them goodbye. Or at least they will soon start giving you trouble. Some hard drives I’ve seen will die if you just slide them into the chassis too fast.
@kuba:
They really are that fragile? I thought that when they were powered down they were supposed to lock down all moving parts to prevent disaster?
My friend gave me one harddisk for installation
I pluged that into my PC, (i.e. PIII, 256MB RAM )
& Repartitioned & reformated it & Instal WinXp_SP2 & other basic software
HDD was running very fine in my PC
Now when i gave him that HDD it was not running in his PC
I tried to plug & run in 3 other PC (PIII, Celeron & PIV) but it did run
When i plug it, it shows option Safe Mode, Starts Windows Normally & other options
but after i select something it just hold for 5-6 sec & shows blue screen error
” x9c9028xz hardware fault ” something like that
& PC restarts
even if i select safe mode it load some file (like normaly hdd do in starting in safe mode)
& again shows same blue screen & PC restarts
I tried evey possible way, like changing PC, changing Jumper, changing options from bios but failed to start
Now i took back HDD in my home
& strange its running its running fine here at my home
Pls help what to do………………
Can u tell me some idea abt that blue screen
In my friends PC i attached one other HDD (to know wheter that PC has any hardware fault or not, but with that HDD it was running)
Pls help……………..