[CentOS] Server HD failed and I think I am hosed

Thu Feb 18 22:32:42 UTC 2010
Alan Hodgson <ahodgson at simkin.ca>

On Thursday 18 February 2010, "Slack-Moehrle" <mailinglists at mailnewsrss.com> 
wrote:
> Also, what would have caused this all of the sudden? This box has been
> running fine for months.

Every hard drive will fail eventually. Some take days. Some take decades. 
Most fail somewhere in between those extremes. But every single one of them 
will eventually die.

That's why backups and RAID are both good ideas.

As for what to do, you can put the drive in any other linux box or boot a 
live CD from any distro and take a look at it. Attempts to fsck may screw 
it up more, though. Probably best to mount whatever's left read only and 
see what you can find.