still fighting the system

Posted Monday, January 12, 2004, at 05:34PM by Eric Richardson

I bought a new hard drive today... 160GB IDE drive from Staples for $140. The 120GB was $130, so 160 seemed to be the sweet spot in the price curve right now. Since my computer refuses to boot from cd, I took the drive over to Kathy's, popped it in the place of her drive, and installed Linux on it that way. That part went fine.

Then I grab the drive, bring it back to my place, and throw it in my computer. Success, it boots up just fine. But now a 60GB IDE drive I have music on doesn't want to be recognized. The BIOS had never detected it right, but before Linux picked it up just fine. Now, though, it doesn't.

I don't want to bore this space with a litany of details, but if you're interested click to read on...

I even tried flashing a BIOS update (since for whatever reason my machine had no problem booting from a DOS boot disk burned to cd) with no new results.

So at the moment I've got all my audio files stuck on a drive I can't get access to. A pain, but no show-stopper. Now on to trying to figure out what in the world happened to cause all this.

I've got 4 SCSI drives attached to my machine at the moment, and those I do have access to, so I'm beginning to try and mount them to see what's up. It's pretty ugly. Consider this output from fsck:

'..' in ... (49057) is ??? (1831425), should be (0). Fix?

Eek... Lots of disconnected inodes getting connected to lost+found/. In fact, that whole partition ended up there. Later I get to figure out what a bunch of files named things like "#90335" actually are.

My simpsons drive seems to have survived for the most part. It looks like season 12 ended up in lost+found/, but the rest looks ok.

I still really have no clue what caused all this. I expected something little, like a superblock on the boot drive getting toasted. But everything seems to have been fried pretty evenly, which I don't understand at all.

Oh well. I'll recover what's recoverable and be glad that I don't really do development locally for the rest.