What's an 'imminent hard drive failure' anyway...? Is there some way of knowing that the hard drive WILL die, or is it a server-thing where the HDD has just been running forever and they break down faster that way..?
imminent failure is detectable by simply reading the server's message log. linux & unix maintain a log file which tell you stuff that happens, a bit like windows' event log. when you start receiving messages like this:
ad0: WARNING - WRITE_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=131384927
then something's wrong. currently, it's only doing it every few hours. the first major downtime we had a couple weeks ago (unexpected) was to clone the server onto a new disk, since this message was popping up every few minutes. had we have left it much longer, it would have died a graceful death.
we are trying something in the meantime though, prior to the clone. there's a "fix" related to this error on the operating system, in which you "slow" the drive down. IDE (the bus/cable the hard drive is connected to inside the server) runs at various speeds. the most recent being what's known as ATA133. this is 133mb/s. allegedly. we've clocked the drive speed down to ATA66 (66mb/s allegedly), although there is generally a marginal difference between the 2, and the "major" speed differences was just a marketing ploy.
we've got a handful of days to monitor this and attempt to resolve it software side first. if, however, this doesn't work, then it's definately a hard drive issue, and the downtime will go ahead as planned.
there is hope though!
Cuccoscratch is working on a major overhaul to Cuccoscratch.com to support the continued success of Cuccoscratch DS and Ta-Wii-t. As we prepare for this huge site update, Cuccoscratch must unfortunately close the Cuccoscratch Forums message boards indefinitely beginning Jan. 26, 2008 . . .
lmao
we'd never desert you guys!
