Proof that lack of backups causes disk failure

Sean picasso@madflower.com
Mon, 8 Oct 2001 17:03:47 -0400 (EDT)


That almost sounds like the heads on the drive got jarred during shipping
and the problems are are just now creeping up on you because it was only
specific spots and you just started accessing them or the kernel just
realized there was a problem. I have had it happen a few times especially
with older drives and portables going through the airport scanners (or at
least the jarring of traveling with it.)

I just hope you didnt have too many new things on it.

Sean


On 8 Oct 2001, Ben Pfaff wrote:

> As many of you know, I do nightly tape backups, and had for the
> last 4 years or so.  Or, at least, I did until I moved out here,
> because my tape drive hasn't been shipped to me yet.  I figured
> that the chances of anything going wrong in the meantime were
> small.
>
> Ha ha--this afternoon I got a console message that there was an
> unrecoverable error accessing /dev/hda1.  Goddamn.  I reboot
> (can't even shut down cleanly because /dev/hda1 has been forcibly
> remounted read-only), fsck -c, fsck -c again to make sure, fsck
> -f a final time.  So now I have a sh*tload of bad blocks.
>
> Normal reaction: Back the disk the hell up, call up Compaq and
> order a warranty replacement.  But I'm going to wait until I
> actually have a tape drive to do most of it.  I'm still going to
> do the "back the hell up" part by copying across the network to a
> machine I admin at MSU, all the way across the country.  Let's
> see how this works out.
>
> While I'm waiting, I'm monitoring the situation by adding a
> nightly cron job that runs `badblocks' and compares to a known
> list to make sure that new bad blocks aren't creeping in
> slowly...
>
>