Re: linux hard drive failed, clicking on bootup

Jeff wrote:
....
The good drive is /dev/hda and the bad one is /dev/hdb...so on reboot,
all I get is about 5-10 repeated clicking sounds on the bad drive and it
either wont boot at all with the bad drive on the IDE bus OR it boot once
but no longer can see /dev/hdb at all.

I have some very important stuff Id like to recover.

Suggestions (other than the obvious, give up and chaulk it up to
experience)? :)

Can't say much what to do save get rid of it as slave and mount as hdc in case part of the failure is not playing nice with the other drive. An alternative to this is drop $20 on a case for an external drive with USB plug in and see if it works differently completely off IDE hardware. (I did get one of these to use old 40GB drives as backup for backup of really important material. A touch slow but works just fine.)

As for back up a couple months ago I noticed how cheap the external drives are and dropped $115 on a 250GB external. The price has dropped since then. Look like inventory clearance prices before the new vertical field drive take over production. In any event back up to a large external drive can be done as easily as cp -R /home/you /mnt/external and is transparent after that. Supposedly there is a way to configure tar to do incremental backups but I haven't figured out the man page on that yet. If you figure incremental you can safely cron the backup task.
.

Relevant Pages

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