I thought someone more knowledgeable than I would have replied to you by now?! I guess I'll take a wack at it! Chris Frederick wrote: > I have a server running Mandrake 9.0, 2 Western Digital 60Gig drives, > and 1 Maxtor 20Gig drive. Lately I've noticed it making high pitched You mention the makes and sizes of the drives but you don't mention which one is making noise. > noises (like a disk would make right before it crashes), and the machine > itself has crashed a few times now. There's an e2fs error writing to > certain blocks. They seem to be random, and in large numbers. I've ran > e2fsck, checked for bad blocks in read only mode, and so far it's found Is the noisy disk the same one that shows write errors? > nothing. Changing /etc/fstab to mount all non essential disks read > only, and removing a good number of cron jobs, will let it run without > any errors, but that kinda defeats most of the functions of the server > (backups). > > Is it possible that a disk can fail on a write, but not a read? Or am I I would think that this is possible but I don't know. > getting a different problem (I hope)? And if it is a disk crash, how > long would you guess I have till it's no longer readable? I'm about > three weeks away from affording a replacement disk. After you have determined which disk is noisy/has errors my advice would depend on what kind of data is on the drive: If the data is: valuable changes daily I suggest that you: --------- ------------- --------------------------------------- yes yes backup the data ASAP and stop using the drive no yes replace the drive after it fails yes no backup the data ASAP and replace the drive when you can no no replace the drive after it fails > > Thanks all... -- Eric (Rick) Meyerhoff _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list