Journal tqft's Journal: Stupid question time - hard disks "imminent failure" & the click of death 2
So I have been paying attention to the SMART warning from my hard disks and making sure my backups are up to date.
This morning heard click click and then machine died - guessing it was the disk with the o/s on. Tried rebooting grub came up (on another disk) but no o/s. Turned it off.
My plan is to wipe and reformat all the disks in the machine - will this work on disks (another one is quite sad as it has had quite a thrashing) already warning of failure? Say run dban then reformat the disks. Will this resurrect the usable portions (almost 1/2 of the big disk with the o/s has never even been formatted) or am I screwed? I do have other disks to put in the machine and in the meantime I have a laptop.
Machine will also receive some overdue maintenance - compressed air, remove all parts, more compressed air, new thermal paste for the processor/heatsink.
Will you take advice from a dumpster diver? (Score:1)
If yes: Don't bother. Really, you will waste a ton of time with a very low success rate. If SMART says it's going to die, it is... If you hear clicking noises, the disk is dying. Trying this will result in a tiny resurrection chance (using a real low level format and you can only do that with the tools the disk manufacturers provide, formerly you could do it from the BIOS -- This takes ages) and after that you will have this gnawing feeling of incertitude for all the time you'll use the disk.
My policy as
Re: (Score:1)
That's kind of what i thought, just kind of hoping it wouldn't be a waste
yes backups - rsync & ssh
rsync -avz -e ssh ian@tqft.local:/newmovies/homebackup.tar.gz .
won't keep anything important there until I get some new disks