[mythtv-users] OT: Predicted hard drive failure; replacement consideration

[Josh Mastronarde]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 1:27 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:

> I, too, have, sadly, had much bad luck with Seagates, from 500GB up to 2TB,
> failing in much less than the expected life, and all, uniformly, in a very
> odd
> way which I've mentioned before here:
>
> once you hit a block in the Red Zone, the drive adapter goes completely off
> line, never to return until you power-cycle the drive, which of course
> generally means the machine.
>
> If you never hit a block in the Red Zone, the drive works fine.
>
> Obviously, given the cycle time, this makes them effective impossible
> to work around, even if you could theoretically do so; DDrescue is
> likewise useless, since "real" reverse read isn't implemented in that
> program, and the author declines to do so.
>

I had the Seagate 7200.11 500GB on my Windows machine fail suddenly last
summer in a similar fashion -- most blocks read fine, but hitting a bad
block rendered the entire drive offline until power cycled.  I ended up
recovering most of the data using a Linux

- Putting the drive on a USB->SATA adapter (which are cheap) helped a lot;
each time the drive became non-responsive I just unplugged and plugged it
back in; the LiveCD Linux session remounted it as a hotplug just fine.  I
discovered that shortcut after spending several hours rebooting the whole
machine :-(

- There are at least 2 different programs written by different people,
ddrescue and dd_rescue -- the latter has a reverse option, at least in
later releases.  Confusingly, some of the dd_rescue web pages' references
call it "ddrescue" also...

- For Windows recovery, it ended up being much easier to create an NTFS
partition on a new drive and have the Linux session mount to that and write
the rescue image than to have Windows mount an ext* partition.  Even found
Windows freeware to mount the image file to copy the files (although even
easier to mount the image in the Linux session and cope the files from
there).

But I agree, that Seagate failure mode is particularly horrible, and
renders many of the other rescue programs I tried useless.

Josh
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