[TriLUG] Failing hard drives (laptops)

[T. Bryan]

On Monday 05 September 2005 16:40, Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Sep 2005, T. Bryan wrote:
> > On the other hand, when I look at the error log (smartctl -l error), it
> > shows the last five errors
> > Error (17|16|15|14|13) at disk power on
> > UNC 45 sectors at LBA 0x01d563ba = 30761914.
>
> don't wait another minute. power it down, 

Thanks.  The stuff in the /var/log/messages freaked me out enough, but I 
wasn't sure what smartctl was telling me.  I hadn't used it before, but I 
think that I'll be adding smartd to my machines.  :-)

The machine/hard drive has been off for over a week, waiting for me to find 
the time to do something with it.  My wife has been using one of the other 
machines this week.  Thankfully, I moved her over to Linux years ago, so she 
can use any of the machines in the house, and she has had access to recent 
backups of her files.  :-)  

> figure out how
> you're going to back it up, then mount it somewhere else
> (ro), back it up and swap it out and thank your lucky stars.

I've already tarred off all of the important files (from Knoppix).  I was 
going to use g4u so that I could get the Windows partition and the Linux 
partition in one slurp, but I think that I'm in a decent spot to recover now 
from the tarballs.

Do I need to worry about /dev/?  When I untar the tarball onto the new disk, 
what do I need to do so that Debian Sarge will have all of its devices 
available?  Should I get /dev/ from the tarball, or can I regenerate them on 
boot?

---Tom