RIP, Beastbits, part 3. The final part for now
Well, this will be the last time I mention this for a while, as quickly as the problems came, they’ve gone again. After the Boot and Nuke, everything appears to have cleared up. The drive formatted under Linux, and it installed the OS to a degree. It failed while installing some libraries ironically relating to flickr, but that was because I possibly downloaded the wrong disk image.
Either way, it booted up, and I returned to Windows thios morning, and the drive is successfully formatting. It’s up to 14% as I type. The question is, who’s to say that the same failure doesn’t happen during normal use another couple of months down the line. It is, yet another one of those damn annoying computery issues that appear one day, and then disappear the next.
It’s even passing the bad block test on HD Tune now. The big blocks of red have all disappeared.
The question lies, however, if I should trust this drive at all. I might make it last until payday, and then rip it out and get a new one.
Oh, and I know that some of you clearly don’t like hearing about my electronic escapades and malfunctions (Back so soon off your holidays Chad?), but meh. I don’t just type this to comment on everything I do. I type it do that it’s a reference point should the same thing happen somewhere down the line, and also if someone comes here from a search engine, there might be a few helpful tips on getting the drive working.
Therefore, in this situation, my solution… if the failure doesn’t sound mechanical (no clicks from the drive, etc), give Boot And Nuke a try. Yes, you’ll have lost all of the data on the drive (which I’m sure you have backed up all safely, yes?), and yes, it will take upwards of 6 hours, longer if the drive is bigger, but it might just revive a failed HDD.
We shall now return you to your scheduled programming. Or at least we will next time I need the toilet. I shall describe the visit in all of its intricate details. Or not.
UPDATE THE SECOND… Oh, okay, it’s not about my toilet movements, I’d just like to point out just how important it is to do regular backups! Remember my broken laptop? I backed up my entire picture folder (several gigs) and my MAME folder (even more gigs), on the hard drive I removed from it, both of which have been restored. Although, yes, it’s a small proportion of what was on the drive originally (the rest will be restored soon), I can’t help thinking that all of my worrying, and backing up *just in case*, has been worth it.
UPDATE THE THIRD, 16th Jan, 9:30AM
I’ll not create a new post, though I have just started restoring from the backup, and it’s going to take a while to restore. The backup drive runs Ubuntu, and also acts as the OS, which means that there’s a fair bit of disk thrashing going on, And, seeing as doing this blog hardly constitutes high CPU usage, I thought I’d continue. What IS taking up all of the CPU usage, however, is the… thing… that allows Linux to write to NTFS disks. It makes me wonder if this is what caused all of the problems in the first place.
A couple of days before, I’d been using Linux to write out some DVDs. Not important stuff, just things that had built on the hard drive over time. I had a little bit of a thought…. it wasn’t that long ago that Linux couldn’t even see NTFS partitions correctly, never mind write to them… it made me wonder if there were any “bugs” involved. Of course, I don’t know whether this was the case, as the whole logical structure of the drive appeared to be corrupt. Boot And Nuke must have restored order to some degree, by resetting and wiping everything. I like Linux, but I’m going to like it less if things like this keep happening…




