Seagate

Another manufacturer that I will be avoiding in future. Ran badblocks this afternoon and found 2400+ on sdb! Seriously, wtf? I also found ~200 on sda which is a Western Digital Caviar and my most important drive :( Fraksake.

I guess I haven't been doing a lot of system admin stuff recently and I'm paying the price now. Literally: £100 for 2x250GB (um, probably only 225GB) Caviars. I think sda might still be good but I'm not going to chance it. My desk is full of busted hard drives now. Must have at least 4 in there. Oh, and reiser4 doesn't support badblock mapping? Que?

So the major problem, as far as I can see, is that reiser4 on /usr had gathered some errors...and those errors were caused by the underlying badblocks on the drive. So even though I have found the badblocks and possibly forced their remap (unlikely since they were being written to often; yes, I should have done more than one pass but I need my computer) -- and fscked the filesystem -- it's nothing more than a band-aid. Fortunately I can swap in new drives on Tuesday.

I was just thinking: "Shit, that means dealing with grumpy ol' GRUB" but it actually doesn't. Phew! GRUB doesn't play nice with me. I've tried pretty hard but I still don't have anything more than an 8-bit menu. Not that it matters but it would be nice if after following the documentation it worked as expected.

Um, which leaves sdb. 2400+ badblocks? It must be pretty fucked. I'm running a second sweep with badblocks now that I'm booting off sda and not a live-cd. Oddly, it's nearly 1/15th through and encountered just 1 badblock. They can't all have been remapped...and I restarted badblocks once or twice on the live-cd and it was still finding loads early on. Should I cancel my order? I mean, I really need the money and I don't really need the extra space. I mean, I could RAID-1 it but then I'm actually losing space. Maybe if I don't see any in the morning I should cancel?

Hmm, I've never RAIDed before but so far my experience with cheap consumer hard drives has made me want to. There must be a level or configuration that would be suitable. Maybe if I just RAID-1'ed / & /usr.

Hmm, well, bollocks. I can't even cancel the order now. I don't think I could cancel it after it was placed either. I'll check badblocks tomorrow and if it's good (which will be unbelievable but a lie worth believing) I will try and cancel.

Fuck it, sent them an 'enote' to try and cancel. Hopefully they can manage to catch it before shipping. I feel bad but if I don't need them then it's a total waste of money. And if I can get them next working day...

Yeah, I'm bodging it but I'm poor so.