[PLUG] Failing Notebook Hard Drives and extreme paranoia

[Keith Lofstrom]

ENU is indeed a good place to find laptop drives.  I have also seen
them in some of the Computer Renaissance stores, which are in many
cities in the western US.

It is probably too late to help Sean today, but I am ultraparanoid
about losing laptop availability when going on the road, especially
if I am giving a paper with it.  So, some tricks:


Besides the nightly Dirvish equivalent-to-full-image backups that I
do, I also carry an Ultrabay hard drive holder for my IBM thinkpad,
with an identical spare 40GB hard drive in it.   Then, at night in
the motel room, I go into single user, kill noncritical processes,
and do a:

   sync ; dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=1049576

Which takes about 2 hours and makes an exact copy of the drive,
including all the ext3 partitions and swap partitions.   If I lose
the hard drive the next day, or do an "rm -rf /", I only lose the
day's work.

Partition your laptop drives with a few hundred empty MB at the end -
it is a pain in the tush to try to copy a 40.9G hard drive into a
different-brand 40.0G hard drive, if you've used all the space. 
Fortunately, data blocks are data blocks, so you can migrate a
whole file system to a different drive, if it fits.  Put a second
swap partition at the end of the drive - those are easy to resize.

Of course, I also carry a CD and a USB stick with the critical data
and presentation on it.

Sean learned (as have I) that laptop hardware will ALWAYS fail the
day before an important trip.  Of course, that is when you are behind
schedule and making all those copies of things, so you are pounding
the keys less gently than usual.

So, the next (expensive) paranoid option is that my wife has the
same model of Thinkpad.  "Sweetums, can I borrow your laptop for a
few days?  Here's the instructions for putting your hard drive back
into 'your' laptop when it returns from IBM service, and here's the
jeweler's screwdrivers."  Thank goodness that IBM always manages to
repair and return laptops within 48 hours.  And the Airborne Express
folks have Thinkpad shipping boxes on hand, just call for an RMA and
a box.   Airborne will deliver a box in the AM and return for a pickup
in the PM, usually.  Sweetums is not deprived of JPilot for long.

That is way more paranoia than most people can stand, but it works
for me.   The nightly backups to the spare hard drive are probably
the easiest (and spare 40G laptop hard drives are $100 these days).
Thank goodness this isn't windows - no "pretty please, may I, Bill?"
required to copy a drive.


As I said in my Dirvish/Rsync presentation, "shit happens".  And as
long as Satan walks the earth in a thong bikini, shit happens at the
most inconvenient time.  Plan ahead and have the tools ready for
recovery, because Satan visits after the computer stores close, and
she will distract you with more shit while you are trying to recover
from the previous disaster.  The bitch.  :-\

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom           keithl at ieee.org         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs