I should have known better, but when I was incarnating the current noisy boat anchor that sits on my desk at home, I put a Hitachi hard disk in it. Not specifically one of the notorious IBM-era eat-your-data models, but something much more recent.
It made it to about six months of age before developing a perforated filesystem ulcer and bleeding out at about 4am on Saturday morning. I didn’t even notice until Sunday night, whereupon I booted into a rescue environment and attempted a fsck. The fsck yielded many, many short reads, which I interpret as the hard disk telling me “I’ve run out of bad blocks to silently remap, so now I’m going to cack on your data in a way you can’t ignore“. My root filesystem was almost completely trashed, leaving almost 4,000 entries in lost+found.
Through sheer luck, one of the only directories to survive the experience was the only one that would have been a pain to replace. It got moved to lost+found, but I was able to recognise it by its contents almost immediately.
So it’s off to Fry’s tomorrow, to buy a new SATA hard disk, one specifically not touched by the evil of Hitachi Global Storage Destruction Technologies. I’ve been wanting to wean myself off PATA for a while (my motherboard goes gimpy if I run the PATA drive with DMA turned on after a cold boot), so now I have an excuse, albeit more catastrophic than I wanted.
Leave a Reply