The Rockjack

This is the third installment of a series of posts to document “How I recovered my Linux systems…”  See the first post and second post for the preliminaries…

My PC-A system’s hardware problem identified  — disk drive sda failed  — and backup resources verified… Need to replace the failed drive and rebuild the system from “bare metal.”  I’d been planning to upgrade this system’s Ubuntu/Linux from version 10.04 to the latest long-term support (LTS) version, 12.04, and this hardware glitch has simply forced my hand.

Time to go shopping? Nope, first let’s open up the box and figure out what, by brand name and model, I’m going to be replacing.  And prudence (Murphy’s great-aunt) dictates that I dig out my anti-static ground strap and attach my wrist to the box-frame, just to be sure I don’t zap something whilst I’m digging around inside.

For me, usually the most formidable problem in any PC repair is just getting the darned enclosure box opened… I’ve been inside this PC-A box before (had to replace a power supply about 18 months ago), and I replaced the little enclosure screws which hold the “just-slide-this-panel-off” sheet-metal with those great little case thumb screws — once you’re into your box for any reason, you’ll be back in there again in the future, so make it easy!

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This is the second installment of a series of posts to document “How I recovered my Linux systems…”  See the first post for foundation and background.

So, we had two hard drive failures in two different Linux boxes, nearly simultaneously.  As is usual with these things, this couldn’t have happened at a worse time:  my “main box” (let’s call it PC-A in the following narrative) crapped out just a couple of weeks before I was scheduled to give a first class “Ruby for Newbies”.  Fortunately, I had my trusty 10-year-old Sony laptop (also now a Linux system) to take up that particular gap… Class development and presentation covered.

What happened, and how did I diagnose it?  This one was simple:  AsPC-A is up and running nearly all the time (it collects backup sets from other household systems, and generally is the strong hub of our family operations), I monitor and experience its general health as a matter of course.  When it starts acting “sick,” I usually know it pretty quickly.  This time, it began running sluggishly, and was pretty obviously “laboring” as it did memory management (process swaps — I told you, I’m a former VMS hacker, so I’m kinda sensitive to this operational behavior).

And although I don’t reboot our Linux boxes very often — unlike Windows, Linux doesn’t need to be routinely rebooted — now seemed like a good time to do so.  Upon shutdown, and after system (re)initialization, it became audibly clear that the sda (first and boot) disk drive was having physical problems… I could hear it.  What I heard was that the disk was having trouble and making bad noises as it tried to spin up — and it failed on (re)boot.  Quick and final conclusion:  Dead drive.

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