tip of the day (was Re: project managment suggestions)

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

Wow, what a time to have a hard drive failure.  I missed being in the
middle of a Perl/Python flamewar.  :-/

BTW, a few tips for all of you...

    1) If you have an IBM drive made in Hungary any time since 1999,
       make sure you have *really* good backups.  (My July 2000
       DTLA-something just suddenly developed bad sectors.  That was
       supposed to be after the bad batch of 75GXP drives.)

    2) If your computer locks up a lot for no apparent reason a lot,
       and you have an IDE drive, suspect the drive.  (I dismissed a
       bunch of lockups on the beta XFree86 and the Radeon 8500LE.
       That still may be the real reason, but it could just as easily
       have been the drive.)

    3) 3ware 7000-series cards will just spew errors where regular IDE
       controllers will lock up the system hard on a bad IDE drive.  I
       am *so* glad I happened to have one sitting here...

    4) This comes in handy when trying to read from a bad drive:

        http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/

    5) Hard drives *will* fail.  Backup, backup, backup, backup.

Luckily I was able to recover enough data from my failed drive that I
did not have to reinstall Linux on my computer.  I was very depressed
when I thought I might have to for the first time in 8.5 years.  :-)

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-7360             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/

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