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Date:	Sun, 15 Feb 2004 19:45:58 PST8
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: Corrupted Partition

Content Type: text/plain

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Sheridan George wrote:
>
> When I shut-down my eCS 1.0 computer it started
> beeping (about once every 10 sec.). I left it and
> came back about an hour later it was still beeping.

When this happened to me it was a hard drive problem -- files couldn't
be written to the drive.

Luckily for me, it was just a little oxidation on the cable connector.
I reseated the cable and everything worked fine. Pull the connectors
off the drive and motherboard (my problem was at the motherboard end),
then push them back on again. And do this several times, to scrape off
any oxidation.

> I shut off the computer (I wasn't smart enough
> to C-A-D first to see what might happen).

When I tried CAD, the system stopped beeping and hung. :)

> Turning it off firmly set in concrete what ever the problem was.

As long as the partition didn't get scrambled, you should be okay.

Do you have DFSee? It fixes a lot of things and there's an excellent
mailing list on Yahoo Groups. http://www.dfsee.com/

> Fry's has the same drive I'm now using (WD 120
> gig, 7200 rpm, 8 meg buffer) for $60 ($108 - $50).

Good luck getting the rebate. I've stopped buying anything with a
rebate on it -- about two thirds of the time I never received a check.

> Would someone comment on installing it along with
> dsync014 (on Hobbes) to give a mirrored copy as a
> way to mitigate the result of a corrupted partition.
> Would the mirror drive's partition be corrupted
> by the same gremlin?

Hold it. DSync is _not_ RAID -- it doesn't mirror in real time. I use
DSync for making backups to a separate hard drive; it's a wonderful
program and I highly recommend it. But I have to run it to make the
backups. RAID is different. Under RAID the same data is written to
more than one disk at the same time, so if one drive fails you still can
read your data. RAID usually requires a special controller (some
motherboards have this onboard) which writes the data to the two drives,
although you can mimic this in software and I think there's an OS/2
software driver that does this (in WSeB perhaps?).

As far as I know the Promise RAID controllers (or at least some of them)
work fine under OS/2, and they're cheap (and they're IDE). A caveat --
Daniella's drivers might not be compatible with the Promise cards, check
her readme. There are several other RAID controller manufacturers for
SCSI drives which have OS/2 drivers.

RAID is only part of any disaster recovery plan. It guards against a
drive failure but doesn't guard against theft-fire-flood. I've
experienced the fire & flood parts. For these, you need an off-site
backup. And then there's stupidity (accidentally deleting a file you
still want). RAID won't help with that, but an on-site backup (such as
made with DSync) can quickly recover the file assuming you have a
current backup.

I was on one of the RAID mailing lists for a while, and RAID is not
foolproof. It seems that the major cause of drive failure is heat.
Like when the air conditioning fails or something blocks the cabinet
fan. And guess what happens to the second drive? It gets just as hot
as the first drive, and it fails too. There was one guy running RAID
with four drives set up so that if two failed he still had all his data,
and the air conditioning went off over the weekend and three of his
drives failed.

I run my DSync backups several times a day (whenever I get up and leave
the keyboard). It's differential and only takes 10 minutes on my
machine. If you want my scripts (they're quite simple) I'll be happy to
send them. I have my system set up so that if a backup is running when
the machine reboots (power failure or whatever) the backup _won't_
restart; this guards against writing a bad file over the good copy on
the backup drive.

- Peter

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