Cav's Place

One of my HDDs is quite clearly about to bite the dust, making very worrying sounds and twice freezing my system intermittently while it sounded like it was trying to get unstuck. It’s possible that it’s the old one, which I only put in for backup purposes, meaning that I won’t need to go through any hassle or reinstall anything but will be left with no backup in case this one will bite the dust as well, which is a prospect I’m not keen on, considering how frequently these seem to fail. There also seems to be something with the month of October, because the previous failure, in 2009, was also during this month. And the one before that, in 2007, was in November…
Now, of course, I have learned my lesson and have a script that backs everything up daily, with the important stuff copied manually once per month in a third place as well, so I won’t be losing anything unless they both fail at the same time and be able to get back the vast majority of the important stuff even if they do, but reinstalling everything will be quite a hassle, plus that I’ll be waiting for a while before getting a replacement. Actually, I’m quite sure that they’re both still under warranty, even the old one having some weeks left, but that was bought from a shop that went bankrupt since, so that’s no use and only the “active” one may get replaced like this. However, if I won’t be able to “revive” it long enough to wipe it clean afterwards, I’d rather not send it and just get a new one instead, which will solve the matter faster but be limited by the available funds.

Oh, it’s just freezing up again. All right, I need to get this posted quickly, because I want to run more tests on both of them and see what happens. If it’s the main one and it’ll fail, I’ll leave this as it is. If not, I’ll get back and edit this with some more details and what my original plan for getting a new HDD was.

Edit: Well, it is the main one and booting off it isn’t exactly an option anymore, but the other partitions are still holding just fine and I can access most of the boot one too, as long as I’m not trying to run things from it and don’t touch the portions that make it struggle and eventually hang. So I’ve been spending the past several hours installing things on the backup HDD and seeing how that holds. Will probably send the main one to be replaced next week and then decide what else to do… Sure hope I won’t end up with this failing as well till then, because it is five years old and has some issues of its own.