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A Shocking Moment

sparhawk

By sparhawk
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sparhawk

sparhawk

Posted
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I have sever installations on my machine. Two W2k and two Linux gentoo setups where I can switch between them via bootloader. Since I currently work a lot on TDM I don't bootup Linux to often, so yesterday I did once again and suddenly one of my harddrives were gone. The freak thing was that it showed up well in the BIOS bootscreen and there was no indication of a problem, but when I booted into Linux it didn't work and I could see an errormessage that teh drive was detected, but timed out during initialization. I checked the cables, and swtiched the drives, to see if this is a fault of the harddrive or motherboard or something else. Then I booted into a gentoo installation disc from CD and suddenly the drive worked fine. :)

I realized that the real problem was that I was booting a very old kernel, I still had in the bootmenu, that I used for driver development, but it wasn't updated in a long time and so this setup was screwed up. When I booted the correct kernel it worked fine. The shocking thing was that, that in the beginning I thought that the drive was giving up on me and I had all kind of important documents on this drive without a backup. Needless to say that the first thing I did was a backup. :) I was quite frustrated when I noticed the failure, and I already thought how expensive it would be to send the drive to a data rescue company for retrieving the files from it. Somehow I doubt I could have afforded it. :)

 

So I wasted a whole evening because I just had an old entry in the bootmenu. This was the first thing that I removed when everything worked again. :)

 

The morale:

Always keep a backup of your important data. :)

Gerhard

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obscurus

obscurus

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And if you are backing up to DVD or CD, never skimp on quality - you get what you pay for, and if you want to be able to read your backup DVD in 2 years time, don't get cheapo ones. I found this out the hard way... And don't forget that most hard drives have a life expectancy of 3 - 5 years, if yours is older, think about replacing it and backing up your data big time.

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obscurus

obscurus

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LOL I know what you mean... I hate doing backups, it is so boring, I'd rather do something else with my 'puter. I have to force my self to do it, and I never do it often enough. :)

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obscurus

obscurus

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I've been using TDK for ages, some of my TDK CD-Rs have been good for 9 years or so. Sony make some good one too... Go with the more expensive Japanese brands. You have to be careful though, because the same company will have different qualities of disc produced at different factories, so get premium ones made in Japan over budget ones made in say, Malaysia.

 

Unfortunately, the only way to find out how good a particular Brand/production run/type of disc is is to simply wait and see how long it lasts. I figure ten to fifteen years would be good, as I expect there will be more durable mass storage solutions available in the next decade or so that will replace CD/DVD as a backup medium.

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Dram

Dram

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Really? I have my System Shock 2 on a Princo. Should I copy it off to something else. Any brand name suggestions?

 

Well, my suggestion would be something like tdk (as obscurus says). I use those today and have'nt had a single problem yet.

 

The main problem with princo is that the hard plastic cover eventually can sorta peel off when it gets constantly heated and cooled in the dvd drive (the cooling obviously when you put it away). They're not that bad, but i have had about 3 of them stuff up on me, which did'nt make me happy.

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