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I have recently built a file server, it’s called lifestream and it’s got two 120GB HDD using Linux’s software RAID (and another tiny one for the / partition). I suspect that something is causing a plague of bad hard drives, several of the Termisoc servers have had one, the one that was going to be the file server’s root partition failed too, now my desktop is also looking a bit dodgy.

My desktop box started sounding a bit like {hard drive off, hard drive on, hard drive spin up} repeat and would only occasionallly boot (like 1 in 10 tries). On those times where it did, I transfered as much as I could to the file server before it broke again. I managed to rescue my home directory and entire music collection (which was good because I had only just organised it).

This morning when I attempted to boot it I got:

hda: timeout waiting for DMA hda: (__ide_dma_test_irq) called while not waiting
hda: read_intr: status = 0x51 {DriveReady SeekComplete Error}
hda: read_intr: error = 0x04 {DriveStatusError}
hda: read_intr: status = 0x51 {DriveReady SeekComplete Error}
hda: read_intr: error = 0x04 {DriveStatusError}
hda: read_intr: status = 0x51 {DriveReady SeekComplete Error}
hda: read_intr: error = 0x04 {DriveStatusError} ide0: reset: success
hda: dma_timer_expiry: dma_status == 0x61

It is strange the hard drive started to error just as I was planning to transfer my data to somewhere safer. One of my previous posts commented on this phenomenon, it feels like your hard drive is more likely to fail when you are planning to back up than when you are not planning to back up. So when you plan a backup you must backup immediately to avoid Murphy.