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Hardware

Journal intermodal's Journal: Death of data 10

Journal by intermodal

In what marks a first for me (yes, I know this will sound like a lie) I had a hard drive die on me. Yes, I've had hard drives go bad before, but never have I had one suddenly quit in its entirety, especially with loud nasty sounding noises. I think one of the read arms just decided to fall off or something. being my laptop drive, naturally its a pain in the arse. I'm running on my spare 4 GB (as opposed to the 30 that died), with my spare 10 coming back on the weekend from my father in law. Running mandrake 9.0 as a stopgap, and plan to reinstall Gentoo, with a potential dual distro boot if mandrake seems to be worth keeping around. Any mandrake users out there want to share some tips? I'm just now finishing adding urpmi sources, but i don't know the ins and outs of the system. I'm no fan of RPM based distros in general, but I figure as long as i'm playing with it for the week I may as well learn a thing or two.

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Death of data

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  • Ximian has pretty good support and automation for keeping packages up to date, but then you either kind of have to stick with it, or scrap it completely.
    It's worth trying at least once.
    And keep checking your security settings. I think it was '7' that would keep resetting them.
    Other than that, it's a handy little distro.
    BTW, what about Slackware?
    • well, recently I told SiliconJesus i'd build a side box to play with his distro of choice, and since it was a good opportunity to play with something I went with it. So far I'm annoyed with the lack of updates commercial distros get once they're not the latest and "greatest", i'm having a hassle just getting up to a modern gaim. (0.59.1 to 0.68)

  • Thats really unfortunate, I hope you had backups!! Was the drive a Maxtor or Fujitsu by any chance?

    By the way: although data loss is never a laughing matter, I thought your journal entry was a reference to Star Trek: Nemesis. :)

    • actually, Nemesis was the hidden root of my subject line, my only concession being the obvious lack of capitalization. But unfortunately, I had only partial backups. The drive was a 30 GB IBM TravelStar notebook drive, manufactured in July of 01. I'll be running a last minute warranty check in case it sat in an IBM warehouse for a long time, but I doubt it.
  • When I was running RedHat I used apt for RPM. It was very sweet. I don't think it ever failed to deal successfully with dependencies, unlike RHN and Ximian, which would occasionally choke. The apt repositories it hits tend to be updated more quickly than the RHN and Ximian repositories as well. I've never tried Mandrake, so I can't make any guarantees there.

    I'm running Gentoo now and really enjoying the speed increase. It has forced me to acknowledge greater ignorance of how the Linux desktop works t

    • I'm also a gentoo user...i'll be switching back once I have that 10GB back. But till then, I have to deal. can't really get a gentoo installation to a satisfying level quick enough to justify installing it on this temporary drive. I remember Apt4RPM from my redhat days, and it was very cool...until my version failed to be the latest. Suddenly nobody updated packages for my distro anymore.
    • urpmi is basically apt-rpm. Its actually a pretty sweet interface, but stay the hell away from the GUI.

      To make your life a bit easier (if you have a 'server' to do it with, copy the install CD's to a server where you can http or ftp export the area to make it much easier than swapping CD's for your urpmi datasource.

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