Journal tqft's Journal: [geek] Take a chance on me 7
In my last je I mentioned I was going to make a bootable backup of my current home system to make a fail safe so I can try re-installing my new video card and be able to get back to a bootable system.
Didn't get there. Mamma Mia was good though.
Guess what happened yesterday? Well probably earlier, but front and center yesterday. Drive with os on it (and some other stuff) started failing. Rebooted machine as the current session froze and saw the big fat SMART warning.
Was beginning to wonder why machine was slowing down - thought perhaps the machine was overheating. How often do you need to replace thermal paste anyway? I have seen a few thermal warnings in the log.
Turned the machine off, booted with puppy to nose around. Checked integrity of drive/partitions. The only one that didn't want to work was the os partition.
Turned it off too let machine and drive cool. Took side of case off - disk was initially almost too hot to touch side of.
Disabled SMART on the drive to reboot.
A manual fsck.
5 hours to rsynch everything except var. Started var before I left home this morning.
Have altered fstab so next reboot should just work - except for next step.
TODO: 1) unmount new / partition after copying old / [just
2) buy some new hardisks
Done a backup recently?
Tested it?
Disk backup? Is your backup on the same drive as your OS? Which disk would hurt most if it failed?
Got a bootable system image available and in your boot menu?
cheap Cds (Score:1)
Every once in awhile I burn my crappy cellphone pics and any tech manuals/data pages (mostly for machinery/vehicles) or ebooks I have downloaded to a CD. That about does it for me. I use online email, no local storage. Hmm, no movies saved, all my movies are on DVDs. Music I don't save, GF has a Cd collection, I gave up years ago mostly when CDs hit and they cost as much as or more than vinyl albums or cassettes. I went, "this is a ripoff"! and stopped buying them, unless really cheap and used at yard sales
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" I use online email, no local storage. "
So do I. To avoid the scenario of losing all my job contacts and other stuff that goes in there.
My big problem is rss feed for job hunting - cannot be done at work. Nothing in the SOE (standard operating environment) at work will handle an rss feed (IE6, office/outlook 2003).
I have gb of movies/tv shows - which I can delete if I need and almost did yesterday until I found some space lurking and that my music was backed up. I also have Gb of collected technical pap
Check your RAM (Score:1)
Even if memtest says it's ok. Take out the sticks, and clean the contacts. Believe it, or not, I've had more than one disk error and other weird stuff caused by bad/dirty RAM. Windows chkdsk was erasing files and then "recovering" them like mad. Almost lost the entire partition. In fact, make sure all your cards have clean contacts. It has cleared up many strange install problems, so it's kind of hard to overstate it.
If you've had thermal warnings on the CPU, then, yes, take the heatsink off, and clean it a
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Thanks for the advice - I will replace the thermal paste, I still have the tube I bought in 2006 of which I didn't use all of it - silvery stuff - that is sealed up tight.
And I will pull everything out and clean the contacts.
No ntfs at home.
"I use partimage for disk/partition cloning."
I wrote a small rsynch script to copy everything (I hope). Which is what i will use to make another image on a spare partition.
A viler den of filth than you have ever seen (Score:1)
Actually it wasn't that bad except in and around the CPU/heatsink. Gave heatsink a really good clean while it was off. Used a cotton bud to get in among the capacitors and remove buildups of crud.
No scorch marks on any contacts - pci card, memory contacts.
Hard to tell when you have to remove the heatsink as it will break the connection. But the paste did look uneven.
Machine is now under full load (distributed computing client will do that) and running smooth (with default 10.04 kernel)
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You won't find scorch marks on the contacts. If you rub them with plain white printer paper, you will see the layer of greenish oxidation that builds up over time. Taking them out and reinserting them probably cleaned them off a bit, but if the machine starts acting up again, clean the contacts with the paper by folding it over both sides, squeezing, and sliding the card back and forth. It's just abrasive enough to clean them pretty good without leaving metal filings all over the place.
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That is clever.
Thanks