In the other section about
Bad Caps
I told about my hard disk making clicking noises. A loud click, louder than a normal head park click. The
clicking was manifest when in the old 'Beryllium' casing. And after transplanting the HDD into the new computer,
the clicking was gone. For a few weeks. And then the click came back. Especially when the computer had been
running for several hours. It looked as if the cause was heating of the HDD.
And then, suddenly, on a wednesday night, the short clicks turned into a machine gun clicking.
Rick-a-tick-a-tick for a long long time. I got really nervous. Am I losing all my data right now? The system
did not react on keyboard or mouse commands anymore. So I powered down by pressing the ATX power button for
the longest 7 seconds I can remember.
The next day I powered up. The system started as if nothing had happened. There was a LiLo boot error but it
just booted normally. I logged on as root and
- created a 50 GB partition on the SATA disk that was already in the computer
- formatted the partition with "mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda2"
- mounted the new partition under "/mnt/hd"
- started the Midnight Commander "mc /mnt/hd"
- with F7 create a subdirectory "old" and go to it
- in the other mc window I went to the /home filesystem
- I copied the lot from /home towards /mnt/hd/old (keeping my fingers crossed)
- I copied the /etc, /root and a few other filesystem towards /mnt/hd as well
Done! My data was rescued! Still, the disk didn't click for a single time. Apparently it didn't matter that 50
GB data was read from it. Lucky me.
The next question was: how do I get my operating system back on the SATA disk? One method would be to use 'dd'
but that would lead to a small inconsistency: the target disk was 0.5% smaller than the source disk. So that
could lead to problems potentially. So I opted for the Windows approach: a clean install of Slackware 12.2
from the original disks. I made sure the computer booted in the correct order and restarted from CD. Half an
hour later, the new Slackware 12.2 system booted up from /dev/sda. From then it was just putting back files in
/etc and such until everything worked as before.
I first created the normal users on the new computer. Then I started mc to copy (NOT MOVE) the /home/old/jan
data back to /home/jan (and the other users in a later stage), thereby skipping all the data that was never
used anymore. This is a time consuming task. But after a few moves, it became clear that the operation was a
success. All mails and bookmarks were transfered in good order.
On this new system it didn't make sense to make do with SeaMonkey 1.1.16 so I downloaded 2.6.1 and installed
it. It found the old bookmarks file and imported the lot automatically. Installing Flash on this browser is
very simple:
- Download the Flash player that ends in tar.gz or something similar
- open the file with the midnight commander
- copy the "libflashplayer.so" file to your personal directory "~/.mozilla/plugins"
Done.
DO NOT install the tar.gz file as you would normally. It installs some files in your system directories and
you do not need them. Just extract the "libflashplayer.so" file from it and put it in every user's
"./mozilla/plugins" folder.
No, it isn't. The click of death sounds seem to be thermally induced. No disk activity also means no clicking.
So I decided to keep the disk and see how long it will last. In order to 'ease on the disk' I put the
following command in /etc/rc.d/rc.local:
/sbin/hdparm -B 0 /dev/hda
which will enforce maximum power efficiency on the drive. Meaning: when the disk has not been accessed for 5
minutes or something, it will park its head and go to sleep. After few minutes you will hear a soft click
because the disk parked its heads.
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