On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 03:52:12PM +0900, henry nelson wrote:
> Important thing to remember is to get intact files to a safe place as soon
> as possible.  Later worry about salvaging damaged stuff.
> 
> I'm on a new disk now.  It's amazing how quiet it is -- I hadn't noticed how
> over time the disk that went bad had begun making quite a racket.

Say, I noticed the same thing this week. I had a Seagate Hawk (2 gig) go
bad on me. It caused a bunch of SCSI errors that brought down the machine
before I figured out what the problem was. (Failing swap devices are fatal,
dangit.) Turns out it would screech, spin down, pause, spin up, and then
repeat.

It managed to keep spinning long enough for me to copy /var/mail off of
it. Man, was it loud as it was spinning up and down! It had a good haul,
though, and has been running almost continuously for seven years.

Now I just need to figure out if I can run this box with no internal
drives. Hmmm.....
-- 
Kevin P. Neal                                http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/

"Nonbelievers found it difficult to defend their position in \ 
    the presense of a working computer." -- a DEC Jensen paper