What a crappy evening/morning

Well, my hard disk crapped out on me today. All of a sudden programs started complaining of my file system being read-only.

At first I suspected I had gone over 95% disk usage as I was downloading some large files at the time - but I was only at 85%. A quick check at the kernel log revealed some scary messages. My disk had been remounted read-only as a result of read errors.

So I rebooted*, only to see lots of the same errors on the text console. Arg! Thankfully, I have another disk with Windows installed on it, so I boot that instead with the intention of installing an Ext3 filesystem driver to pull some important files off. Scarily, opening /home/alex makes lots of noises and then reveals that it is empty. :(

* Why? Don't ask.

However, a refresh later and it's full of my files again, yay! ... !? ... Anyway, I managed to back up everything I really wanted to, but my Music folder really took a hit, with only 150 or so randomly selected files remaining. Thankfully, I have a full backup at home that I made at the end of September, so all of my 12" rips will be there, along with a few MP3 files that I had purchased way back when. All of my CDs I can rip to FLAC again, so that's not a problem. All of my original Beatport purchases (I counted them!) are intact in my "Archive" folder, but unfortunately, the same could not be said for my Trackitdown collection. In fact, none of my TID purchases were in the folder they were supposed to be in. Instead, I'm greeted with some more bad hard disk noises. I'm gonna plead with them to let me re-download my collection.

So, new 320 GB Seagate hard disk on the way. Gonna do the best disk image rip that I can with dd_rhelp, then have a go at fscking it to see what else I can recover.

The sun shines, grass grows, and hard disks fail. It's the first time it's got me, and thankfully, I've been let off reasonably lightly. Don't let it catch you out.

Well, it's 05:30, and I've got labs at 9am. Better get some sleep.

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