rivaridge.equiraptor.com died today.

I'd seen some messages in the logs the past few months suggesting hard drive problems, but they had previously always occurred when a partition reached 100% full, so I hadn't worried too much. Around 11:00 today, I had troubles reading a file... The read attempt would time out. I checked the logs and the drive use, and the logs were spewing the errors, and no partition was full. Very soon thereafter, any shell that attempted to access the hard drive would just... stall. Nothing ever came back. New shells could no longer be created (have to read from the drive for that), and everything I tend to do needs to read from a hard drive at some point, so I quickly lost all of my open shells.

Work was kind and let me leave a couple of hours early to go deal with it. They're all geeks, they understand. I came home and collected IDE drives. I found an 80G and a 40G Western Digital, and a 60G IBM drive in a pile. I powered off ridge and plugged them into the primary embedded IDE controller one at a time... I was unsure of the health of the IDE controller, as well, and wanted to see if it could even see these drives.

It turns out, it couldn't. It could see the IBM drive (which showed up as a 33G capacity drive), but neither of the Western Digitals. nugget had a Promise IDE RAID controller lying around, so we plugged that into the machine. It could see all three drives, but wouldn't let me create a RAID 1 (no two drives were the same size). Also, it was seeing the 60G as 33G, just like the embedded. So the 80G and 40G have ended up on that controller, with the 60G on the embedded. This may mean I'm more likely to lose the 60G again, but... Oh well. I may not.

I've reinstalled FreeBSD on the machine, upgrading to 6.1 (it had been on 4.10). It's currently building world to head to 6.1-STABLE from 6.1-RELEASE. I had some backups on dazed, though not all of them where as new as I could wish. Still, I haven't lost any needed data. All will be well with ridge in a few days, and I'll be playing with FBSD 6.

I just wish this buildworld would go faster.

Tags: computers, death, nix