The best-laid plans...

[mdlbear]

It's actually been a fairly productive day, but not quite the way I planned it.

About five minutes after making the backups this morning I discovered that the backup drive wasn't accessible. As in, not even visible to the OS as a device. Not good. This has happened before. The first time, I attributed it to the new USB enclosure, and moved it into my workstation. The next couple of times, I attributed it to the long interval between weekly backups. But, y'know, five minutes isn't very long, and three times is a conspiracy.

I'd been planning a Fry's run with selkit anyway: there was a motherboard/CPU combo for $108 that looked good. But I'm not really going to need a new workstation for a couple of months (the speed will be critical for audio editing at that point), and it will be either cheaper or faster then. I needed a new backup drive today. So, for just about exactly what the MB/CPU would have cost I got a 500GB Seagate SATA/300 drive. (At first I was misreading the boxes and thinking they were all 300GB drives. Dumb bear. The fact that the 300 was in much bigger type than the size didn't help.)

It takes a really long time to check a 480GB partition for bad blocks. It'll take even longer to tar my backups over, but I'll be able to get it started tonight and it will probably be finished by morning. Meanwhile, I'm making another set of backups, this time without history, on the 500GB drive I borrowed from work Friday and put into a USB/eSATA case. That'll be quicker.

Oh, and the big partition on the 200GB drive I'm using in the workstation? The partition I was going to wipe out so I'd have someplace to record onto when the workstation turns into the recording machine? Corrupted. It came back after an fsck, but can I trust it? It's pretty old -- up until May I'd been using it in the filserver, so it's been up 24/7 for a couple of years.

I need to reboot more often.

No walkies. Between a busier schedule than expected, and some unexpected muscle twinges, I figured it was best to declare today a "day of rest".

Comments

Frys Mobo combos.

[tregare.livejournal.com]

you need to be careful of those combos at Frys, most fo the low end (price) ones use ECS motherboards which have terrible quality issues.

Re: Frys Mobo combos.

[mdlbear]

I know -- I've had several ECS MB's, and they're not all that great. This was an ASUS, however.

Re: Frys Mobo combos.

[tregare.livejournal.com]

cool, I didn't know if you'd experienced them. ECS -used- to make good motherboards, but that was back when the 486 was the current x86 chip out there.