Hard drive failure.

[laidlaws]

My main hard drive is a 500 GiB Seagate Barracuda ATA, only a few months old. Last night I came back to my computer to find numerous syslog error messages (sorry, they meant nothing to me) so I rebooted. Now the disk starts up O.K. but after about 15 minutes, becomes inaccessible. I tried reinstalling, but part way through installing packages, all partitions are seen as read-only (possibly not even present?)

Windows 7 starts up O.K. but within about the same timeframe, the desktop freezes. The mouse arrow will move, but clicks or keyboard input are ineffective. At one point, a delayed write to a temporary file on the Win7 partition failed.

On startup from cold, the BIOS correctly identifies both drives, but on a reboot, it sees the second drive (an 160 GiB Western Digital) only. The utility from Seagate's Web site can't find any Seagate/Maxtor drives. GParted reports an error accessing the drive, and complains about incomplete ID information. Otherwise, all the data seems to be intact.

So the problem is not OS-related, but time-related. The only thing I can think of is a failure somewhere in the electronics of the drive hardware. I am running off the second drive at present. Any ideas?

[laidlaws]

It seems I am not alone. An identical problem with a similar (Seagate) disk:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/25283 ... unreadable

No replies to his thread. (I doubt that it is his MBR, but isn't that fixable?)

I noticed a lot in the Seagate forums where a Mac became read-only, but Seagate is a reputable brand, and there it was read-only, not inaccessible.

[isadora]

To me it sounds like a hard-disk getting to it's end.
Had great troubles with some Seagate Barracuda some years ago.
In the end it appeared, wrong driver-software-version was implemented during factory.

[laidlaws]

That is what I thought. Thanks Isadora. I am glad now that I didn't keep my backups on the same drive. There was plenty of space to do so. Windows is now starting its automatic repair, and getting nowhere.

[doktor5000]

Run something like Seagates Seatools or HDAT2 on the drive from a bootable cd, like Hirens BootCD which contains both (and many other useful tools): http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

[laidlaws]

Thanks Doktor. I have already run Seatools from WinXP on the Western Digital Drive. It could find no applicable products. As I write, the drive is now completely inaccessible. The BIOS can see it on a cold start, but not on a reboot.

[Ken-Bergen]

Just a thought but it could be your motherboard.

I had four Seagate hard drives that appeared to fail over a few months and it wasn't long after that the computer wouldn't even boot.

So far I've tested two of them on my new computer and they appear to be fine.

[doktor5000]

As I write, the drive is now completely inaccessible. The BIOS can see it on a cold start, but not on a reboot.

That's why i said try it from the bootable CD

[wilcal]

I always have my legally purchased copy of:

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

close at hand. On critical systems, just before
a new Mageia install, I run spinrite at least
overnight to make sure the target HD is at
least not ready to die. Spinrite will recover
files, regardless of OS. Big drives with a
lot of bad sectors may take many days to
recover it all.

When you run spinrite make sure the drive
under test is well ventilated. Open the chassis
and put a little fan next to it.

Spinrite is $89. It downloads as a MS exe
archive file. It extracts just fine under
Wine.

[laidlaws]

Thanks. I returned the drive under guarantee, and bought a new one to keep me going. What really astounded me was restoring my rsnapshot backup. It was only of my Home directory, but I put it all back with rsync, and the result was virtually where I left off. Apart from what I excluded from the backup, I really lost no more than one important incoming email.

[wilcal]

It was only of my Home directory, but I put it all back with rsync, and the result was virtually where I left off.

I run my entire backup scheme using rsync script files ( 1x/day).

[filip]

I lost one HD still in warranty but luckily I did backup in previous run . Otherwise I would loose everything.

For me rsnapshot is really great too. Very positive experience here . I can go back to any backup point in time and restore it if needed. It protects my data mostly from my deletion . Many times already .
I had a few HD space issues until I had enough of that and did my research. Now if that would happen again I'll solve that in minutes. Sometimes something just changed UID of my pictures folder to root and then later back. So if rsnapshot started in between it just copied that as it should so it wasn't the cause. But I don't have any idea which software change UID by itself . Do you?

I run my entire backup scheme using rsync script files ( 1x/day).

Once per day is too little for me. I my setup rsnapshot runs hourly. As it creates hardlinks there is very little HD space overhead.

They say that there are two kind of people: those that had a data loss and the other ones that will have it.

[wilcal]

Once per day is too little for me. I my setup rsnapshot runs hourly.

Do you have any active db's to deal with?

[filip]

Once per day is too little for me. I my setup rsnapshot runs hourly.

Do you have any active db's to deal with?

Not exactly as this is more or less workstation for development. So database entries on this machine are used in various tests and not as real data. Sometimes I backup those databases manually. Hourly schedule is there as I do erroneous deletions or unwanted changes now and then . For active database backup probably some snapshot file-system is more suitable.

[wilcal]

For active database backup probably some snapshot file-system is more suitable.

How would you like to back up the YouTube db?

[filip]

For active database backup probably some snapshot file-system is more suitable.

How would you like to back up the YouTube db?

I don't know, I'm not an expert on databases especially on such a scale. That statement was just a guess. That's why I used term probably.