Re: The Small Company's Guide to Hard Drive Failure and Linux

[Frank Berger <Frank.Berger () fm-berger de>]

Hey *,

I also had a lot of trouble with hard drives in the past...
So just some more hints from my side :-)

Dave Aitel wrote:
> [hard drives messing]

to get more proactive abilities, check out the smartmontools at
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
helps a lot in constantly monitoring the Raw Read Error Rate or
HD Temperature...

> One might think you could use dd to duplicate your drive. I initially 
> tried this, and my results were not good. I did remember to use dd 
> if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc conv=noerror (the noerror flag is important). 
> However, this takes forever and a day. Basically it'll take all night. 

I also had bad experiences with dd when it comes down to deal with
physical data corruption. I can recommend dd_resuce which worked
for me even when dd failed. It is also a little bit faster
(especially when your drive hits bad blocks).
http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/

> involves not having to ever do this again. For those of you not in the 
> know - you want a hardware supported (get a good modern motherboard) 
> RAID-1 solution and you want to be able to swap out one of your two 
> drives (mirrored) when Linux tells you that one is bad. You also want to 

using RAID-1 is most of the times also okay as a software RAID
configuration. Normally you do not see much more CPU load doing RAID 1
as software...

Anyway its always a bad situation when your primary server fails :-). If
you have the money you may also consider to buy a remote management
solution which may also include a virtual floppy option.

Bye
Frank
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