Re: [tlug] Clunk, Clunk, the Drive is Dead

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

On 12/8/05, Mark Sargent <powderkeg@example.com> wrote:

> After having to turn off the power, due to the system locking up, and
> re-booting, I'm back to the point of being dropped to a shell, only to
> finally get to the same sticking point again. I then completely
> re-installed, as there wasn't anything worthwhile on the drive, and just
> to see what would happen. The install was successful, and I had been
> using it for alomost 2 days, when all of a sudden, last evening, I got
> some clunking sounds from the drive, and it locked up the whole system,
> again. Upon re-starting, I was dropped again, to a shell, for the same
> result. Thoughts.? Cheers.

Yes, the drive is about to die. Toss it.

With Unix, the *kernel* almost never gets so messed up that you need
to re-install. Your instinct to do so probably stemmed from years of
Windows use, right? :)

Seriously, the only time you really "need" to reinstall from scratch
is when you feel the software has gotten out of hand, and don't want
to deal with the dependency nightmare that trimming your installed
software down would probably entail.

When you get a hardware-related error from something as low-level as
fsck, that is almost always an indication of an actual hardware
problem, not corrupted software.

-Josh