[aklug] Re: Wife's hard drive is failing

I tried doing some troubleshooting of the drive from the BIOS
utilities, which allow me to directly query the drive's SMART
do-hickey, but I don't get very far because it throws an error almost
immediately.

I have a WD Caviar Black on the way from Amazon. WD has a free
download of Acronis TrueImage, which I think will be my first option.
At this moment, the drive still boots fine and operates fine UNTIL the
computer goes into sleep mode. At that point, the drive doesn't wake
up properly and after a hard reboot the AMD RaidX software will
proclaim the SMART error. So the odds look very good for me to be able
to run TrueImage to mirror the drive, and then swap it out entirely.
In which case, problem solved. For now.

I'm thinking about doubling down on this and getting a second WD
Caviar Black to RAID together.

I'm thinking that if I'm trying to run something like "Recover Keys"
it will be because I cannot boot this drive, cannot mirror this drive,
but I can still use it as a slave. In which case I'm no longer worried
about recovering keys, only recovering her data. But the option still
needs to be on the table. Didn't know about the "Recover Keys"
program. Hopefully it doesn't come to that.

Maybe I can use this problem as leverage to shift her over to linux.
Or at least get her to save all her camera dumps to the server instead
of to folders on the desktop.
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Received on Tue Nov 13 10:56:13 2012