2009/1/29 Scott Silva <ssilva at sgvwater.com>: > on 1-29-2009 8:30 AM Anne Wilson spake the following: >> 2009/1/29 Alex H. Vandenham <alex-qMVNeVs1MAKw5LPnMra/2Q at 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