Re: Serious problem with Linux on an old PC

Bernard wrote:

Essentially it looks like the disk is falling apart.

Get a new disk, and reinstall on that.

Yes, but then, why did this happen last june on /dev/hdc3 and now in
/dev/hda5 ? These are two different disks (my PC has 3, the third one
being hdb). It seems curious that, after 8 years of good service, both
disks would give up at the same time or just about... I have heard of PC
lasting 15 years or more...

But retail hard drives? The longest I ever got one to run was about 7 years,
running 24/7.

I now have 2 10,000rpm SCSI drives that have over 6 years on them, also
running 24/7. I do not know how much they have left on them. If I were
running a commercial installation, I might consider replacing them on
general principles.

If the failure rate distribution is fairly tight, or if it is just that the
statistics are right, this would not be a surprise that two drives in the
same machine failed within a year of each other.

The alternative is that you are doing something that would cause two drives
to fail within a short interval. Possible though. I was at a location where
there were about 10 machines, each with three removable pack hard drives.
One head crashed. The dust thrown off by this caused the other heads to
crash. ... until all 30 drives had to be totally cleaned up, heads replaced,
etc. (Replacing heads was possible in those days.) Fortunately everything
was backed up daily, so no one lost over a day's work.

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 09:35:01 up 15 days, 18:44, 3 users, load average: 4.36, 4.27, 4.21
.

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