On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 10:56 PM, Howard Sanner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > For a few weeks I've been getting unrecoverable read errors on > bootup. It has only affected various printer config files, and, > since I don't have a printer hooked up, that doesn't matter. I > have been madly backing things up and figured I was going to have > to install a new HD.
These errors did not trigger an fsck? At what stage in the boot did they occur? BIOS/POST? GRUB/LILO? Kernel startup? Or after the kernel mounts the root partition (this usually happens ~3s after the kernel messages start spewing up the screen). > The question is this: Do I have a major HD problem lurking that > fsck hid, or did fsck really make the problem go away? It's certainly more likely that you have a hardware problem, although that could be something as simple as a loose cable. I would weigh the costs of downtime and a restore from backup (are you using Amanda? ;) against the costs of a new drive and a controlled transition. I generally use LVM, so in this situation I have usually added a new (and inevitably larger) drive, pvmove'd the volumes to it, and then used the old drive as /tmp, /scratch, Amanda holding, a RAID mirror, or swap until it died. Now that I'm thinking more about green computing, my preference is to simply retire the old drive, despite its "mostly working" status. Dustin -- Storage Software Engineer http://www.zmanda.com
