Entries Tagged 'Hardware' ↓

Not sure what the guilty party was, but my computer stopped driving my monitor, so after some pointless reboots and USB fiddling I re-seated the video card and tried to turn the computer back on.

Then I saw some cool lights, fans whirring, and OH FUCK my hard drive is on fire.

I smelled some life-deleting chemicals, then, fortunately, the fire put itself out.

Now I have a dead computer (I fear it) with a bunch of suspect parts.

I finally had a Seagate drive die on me. Fortunately I have a 200GB RAID 0 setup (thanks mdadm!) on my clunky old Ubuntu box.

I finally realized a drive was bad when Ubuntu kept re-mounting the RAID as readonly. (A torrent stopped downloading.)

% sudo apt-get install smartmontools
% sudo smartctl -a /dev/hde
smartctl version 5.36 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 and 7200.7 Plus family
Device Model:     ST3200822A
Serial Number:    4LJ1Z3GZ
Firmware Version: 3.01
User Capacity:    200,049,647,616 bytes
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   6
ATA Standard is:  ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 2
Local Time is:    Sat Oct 20 18:35:14 2007 PDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
See vendor-specific Attribute list for failed Attributes.
...

I’ll have to look into that 5 year warranty!

It’s lame that mountd, smartctl, and mdadm are not on speaking terms. You’d think mdadm would have marked the RAID as degraded after all of these drive failures.