Welcome to My World

My day began with momentary grumpiness as I was awakened by the sound of somebody banging on my door. My annoyance quickly subsided when I realized “ooh! That’s going to be the new 750GB disk!” Sure enough, a UPS minion stood proudly at my doorstep bearing a box-shaped gift, and within (no signature required, which I thought was kinda odd) was a shiny “new” (read: “certified refurbished”) 750GB disk.

Since I was up a couple hours early, I decided “ah, what the hell, I’ll try this whole thing and if it doesn’t work I can look up why this afternoon.”

Color me stunned — it actually took less time than anticipated to get the data copied over, it took fewer steps, and the new disk booted right away, no questions asked. It all worked on the first try! The weird part? I didn’t even have to update LILO!

• Powered off the desktop
• Stuck the new disk in
• Booted from the “System Rescue” CD I snagged yesterday
• Used dd (it turned out ddrescue doesn’t quite do the job I expected it to do) to copy the whole 80GB disk to the new 750GB disk
• On a hunch, I decided to push my luck here — after the copy, and before rebooting to test the new disk, I deleted the partition table and recreated it with the new sizes for everything (including swap)
• Mounted the new filesystem (still 80GB) and ran xfs_growfs on it; it ran without complaint and reported a new (much bigger) filesystem.
• Powered off again, and pulled the plug on the 80GB disk
• Powered on, and to my astonishment the system came right back up, booting from the new, bigger disk without complaint.
• Powered off, removed the 80GB disk permanently, replaced it with the new Samsung 750GB disk I got last week, closed up the case, and fired it all back up.

It’s purring like a kitten I’m copying all the crap off the 500GB disk that’s also failing now, and the shipping labels & RMA are already printed (I can reuse the box Seagate shipped the replacement disk in). Once the data’s copied (and I’ve had time to zero the disk) it’ll get sent back, and the final bit of effort on my end in the Dead Hardware Parade will be done! Woohoo! See my next post for an update on the HP AC adapter fiasco.