Fare thee well, ye disk drive of Harmony

[mdlbear]

Last night cflute gave a good critical listen to CC&S in its present state. Main problem is boomy guitar, so lots of EQ is in order. More ears are good. We arranged for a last-minute recording session after I got off work today, and before her flight home.

A little before dinner, I went to update the audacity projects in Harmony (the recording box, of course)'s local track directory and got errors. Weird errors. Filesystem-corruption-type errors. Not good.

e2fsck'ed the drive. Twice. Attempted to reboot. It's fsck'ed but good. R.I.P. If I'm lucky I might be able to erase it. But by that time it didn't matter; I'd already given up on it for the night and copied the relevant track directories to the Mac laptop which, along with an Edirol UA25, constitutes my field recording rig. There was maybe half an hour of delay, but I got set up with a minimum of fuss.

Thank the Maker(s) for the fact that Audacity is cross-platform! Got good harmony chorus vocals on "Programmer's Alphabet", and a killer whistle part on "Guilty Pleasures". That one still needs some drum, but...

The drive in Harmony was one of the old IBM 120GB drives that were in the fileserver two upgrades ago (before the 200's and the current 400's). So it's not really surprising that it's finally bitten the big one. It could have picked a more convenient time, but at least it died before we recorded onto it, and before the corruption spread onto the fileserver. I hope -- there may indeed be some screwed-up tracks lurking in there. I have the weekly backups, but...

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Argh, I coulda told you those drives were dead men walking... if it says DeathStar on it, don't put anything you care about on'em. Maybe the Hitachi ones, maybe not, no way to tell yet.

[mdlbear]

Actually they'd had a pretty good run up until now. Well out of it's three-year warranty when it expired, so I can't complain. Much.

[snobahr.livejournal.com]

I'll be the first to say that I know bugger-all about sound-mixing software. digital_panther pointed me to Audacity when I rambled my podcasty dreams at him, and jumping flapjacks of death, I love that program!