Things that go b0rk in the night

A sorry and tedious tale of hardware failures in a world where technology and frozen peas collide.

I got up this morning (or rather I was dragged up by Mia, as usual, at an ungodly hour) and the first thing I noticed as I wandered past my office on the way to the bathroom was a horrible silence where the happy whirring and grinding of a dust-filled fans and creaky old hard drives should have been.

An inspection over breakfast revealed that the power supply in one of the office PCs was dead. No big deal, especially since it had been running 24/7 for 8 years, so I pulled one out of a less important machine, stuck it in and turned on the power. Nothing happened. A whole lot of tinkering (me plugging and unplugging things and cursing, Mia dripping porridge on the motherboard) later, it turned out that it would only power up if the power was disconnected from one of the drives. Either the power supply had blown and fried the drive’s on board electronics, or vice versa. Whichever way round it happened, add a totally dead drive to the casualty list.

The dead drive was the boot drive, and the other two were full. More cannibalism – the same less important machine had a spare-ish drive in, so I pulled that out and to my horror saw the last word I wanted to see on the label – Deskstar, a.k.a. Deathstar. I thought the last of these had already died (I think I’ve suffered at the hands of 10-ish). I pondered on whether it was even worth the effort of installing an OS on it, but decided I needed the machine back up and running straight away so I put the drive in and powered up again.

The noise that came next will be a familiar one to anyone who has ever had encounters with a Deathstar. Kind of a thwarp-thwarp-thwarp noise, but more sinister. The noise means you’ve lost your data, unless you’re prepared to go through a fortnight long routine of freezing the drive overnight (in an airtight container please), powering it up with some frozen peas (dry/airtight again) on top and frantically copying off data until it starts thwarping again and has to go back to the freezer.

I’ve seen the freezer trick put down as an urban myth before, but for particular kinds of drive failure and specifically the classic Deathstar one, I guarantee it works. Not as well, from an efficiency perspective, as having backups, but the end result is the same. Anyway, I didn’t want the data off the drive, I just wanted it working which it suddenly, at the one moment I needed it, wasn’t.

While I’m talking about the Deathstar, or Deskstar if you insist, be aware that it has a little cousin, the Travelstar. Now I suppose this is purely anecdotal, but being the sort of person that people come crying to with tales of “my laptop’s bust” it’s the sum of a significant number of identical anecdotes, in each of which the poorly laptop is put on the operating table and out comes a thwarping Travelstar. My personal (call off those lawyers) view on the subject is this: do not touch an AnythingStar with a bargepole. I wouldn’t even store my spam on one.

Plan C then. I booted from CD using the fabulous Trinity Rescue Kit (never go anywhere without a TRK CD) and managed to find a old and forgotten swap partition on one of the machine’s data drives. Small, but not too small for a temporary Linux install. A bit of makefs-ing and wget-ing and I had the partition formatted and the Ubuntu network install kernel in place. The relevant files live here for future reference – you just need ‘linux’ and ‘initrd.gz’ putting in /boot to avoid the whole download and burn ISO nonsense.

The only thing that wouldn’t work was GRUB, which steadfastly refused to install itself to the partition from the native TRK environment no matter what I tried, and I couldn’t manage to build a GRUB boot disk from there either. Out with another old faithful, the All In One Boot Floppy. Running from that, GRUB worked and booted straight into the Ubuntu installer and the machine was back up and running not long after, albeit with a lot less storage than before.

So, final scores: two dead drives, one dead power supply. Data lost: none, apart from a bunch of redundant backups and a load of virtual machine images that are quicker to rebuild than to back up. Moral of the ‘story’ – there isn’t one really. In keeping with a common theme here, you’ve wasted your time if you’ve read this far, but hopefully you will have at least been reminded about backups. Don’t be one of those people who brings me their dead Travelstar and makes me tell them they’ve lost all their family photos for the last two years and several months of work.