[PLUG] Failed hard drive, field swapping

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Mon Oct 12 16:52:47 UTC 2009


I was in Baltimore this weekend to present Server Sky to the AMSAT
satellite amateur radio symposium.  The other presentations were
all Powerpoint, and they went through two failing laptops and all
the usual compatability issues.

In the middle of the Friday sessions, my RHEL-clone laptop started
throwing bus errors and behaving badly.  A reboot got tangled in
hundreds of sector read errors.  I was planning to use my own
laptop for my Sunday morning webslide presentation, since the web
browser on their third laptop wasn't configured right for SWF or
Javascript (or a lot of other things, they were fighting it all
weekend).

Fortunately, I had brought along the Ubuntu Heron hard drive that
I use at Linux clinic, and a drive swap got me back on the air.
Using a spare drive bay and a USB flash drive, I was able to get
my presentation off the old hard drive and onto the Ubuntu drive.
The Sunday morning presentation went well, with remote control
and wydiwys navigation and animations all behaving splendidly. 
I even updated some slides an hour before presentation.  I would
have been in deep trouble if I was using M$. 

I was missing some of my usual apps on the Ubuntu drive, but the
really slow hotel wifi was still fast enough to add them with
synaptic, and config files from my home backups over the VPN.

I am back home, where I have an identical spare hard drive to my
RHEL-clone.  I am rsyncing the files from my wednesday dirvish
backup.  Next, I rsync the thursday and friday files off the
failing drive, some files off the Ubuntu drive, and I should 
be good to go, with no more than some inconvenience.  Another
spare drive (Seagate 160GB PATA) is on the way from Newegg, so
I can recover the next time this happens.

BTW, I did have some warning - the night before I go on a trip,
I make a dd copy of my laptop hard drive to the spare.  This time,
it failed halfway through (corrupting the spare).  So, I brought
the Ubuntu drive and the spare drive bay, and saved my butt.

Keith

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



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