on 1-29-2009 9:02 AM Anne Wilson spake the following:
2009/1/29 Scott Silva ssilva@sgvwater.com:
on 1-29-2009 8:30 AM Anne Wilson spake the following:
2009/1/29 Alex H. Vandenham alex-qMVNeVs1MAKw5LPnMra/2Q-XMD5yJDbdMReXY1tMh2IBg@public.gmane.org:
On Thursday 29 January 2009 10:15:38 am Anne Wilson wrote:
I assume that the hdd is failing - but I haven't seen any messages from smartmontools. Is there any way I can check that? If it is I don't want to waste time trying to repair it.
try smartctl to see what the monitors have been finding for you.
man smartctl
Thanks. I'd been trying to remember what command I needed for that :-)
The short test has completed without errors. I'll run the long test during dinner. Assuming that that also runs without errors, I guess that the next thing is memtest?
More suggestions?
Thanks
Anne
If you had many power failures, the filesystem might just be severely trashed. Journals and files out of sync, etc... If a good fsck didn't fix it, you might just be in for a wipe-reinstall, or many hours of finding and fixing corrupted files.. I would install to a new drive, and then you can take some time recovering from the old drive as you find things missing. That way you will still have the old system for whatever might come up. I always seem to find something that didn't get backed up properly.
Two days ago I discovered that the failures had indeed totally trashed the system. I did re-install, formatting only / and /boot, but I've had a couple of these spontaneous shutdowns since then, which is why I suspected hardware failure.
I've got copies of just about everything, I think, on an external drive, and I could try another drive as you suggest, mounting the old one in an external case, which I have. I can cope with this, but I'm deeply unhappy about not knowing what happened, and whether it is likely to happen again.
Anne
Are the failures power related, or is the system just shutting down on its own?
If the latter, I would suspect either a power supply or a processor fan. If the former, maybe you need to invest in an inexpensive UPS.