Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to sexybass!! Have a great one!!

Just what I !@#$% need

Disconnecting the mirror drive -- the Maxtor, with errors -- had no effect on the main problem, which still appears to be the Seagate sticking its fingers in its ears and going "la, la, la" while the kernel sulks in a corner because nobody will talk to it.

I'm really unclear as to whether this is a problem with the Seagate drive itself, (there's another one, only slightly bigger, over in the recording box that still works fine), with file corruption of some sort (hard reset after a crash could easily have left some lingering problems on the disk), with SATA drives in general (highly unlikely -- they're working fine on my system at work), or with this particular BIOS (also unlikely).

I'm also wondering to myself whether I should drop back to PATA, or get a 500GB SATA drive. I'm leaning toward the latter, if only because I put my shiny new 500GB PATA drive in an external box and the magic smoke went out. Grump, indeed. Smelled like the magic smoke in the box, so the drive is probably still ok. One hopes.

Plus the fact that I have a pretty full schedule today, so I'm not going to have time to do much work on this, no matter how urgent.

 ...

My inclination is to start by reconnecting the mirror drive, fsck it, and see if I can get a clean backup. Then go to Fry's and get one of the Maxtor 500 SATA's they have on sale. Then we'll see.

10:17 fsck done -- errors on both mirror/ and mirror/home, no doubt due to crashes while writing. Backing up now.

Saturday wrap-up

This morning after my walk I went to Fry's and found that the drives they have on sale were Seagate rather than the Maxtors they had piled up yesterday. Those were still $160, and had a 3-year warranty instead of Seagate's 5-year. Then I made the interesting discovery that the Maxtor's and some of the Seagates were made in Thailand, while the otherwise-identical Seagates in the big piles were made in China.

Hmm.

A quick trip home confirmed that the flaky Seagate drive I removed a couple of months ago was Chinese, and I seemed to recall that the failing one is, too. The Maxtor I've been using as the mirror drive is Thai. Drove back to Fry's and bought a Thai Seagate.

After that, we went to Dave and Joyce's to bring them lunch: barbecued chicken, cole slaw, and baked beans from Emil Villa's. Much appreciated; Joyce isn't especially mobile due to health problems (which, however, should be fixed fairly soon). From there we went to Kathy Mar's bash. Good stone soup.

I did a little singing at Kathy's: "Ship of Stone", "Cicero in the 21st Century", "Desolation -- Oh, No!", and "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts". I'm impressed with how much nose-watering has helped my voice: singing is less painful and doesn't dry me out nearly as quickly as it used to.