Hard drive click of death...

philipkessel4441 · 2012-03-30T07:48:11.000Z

Tony Poupa wrote:

Happened on my home desktop PC, so in desperation found an old Ubuntu v7.04 live CD which had Firefox v2.0 on it and ran that from my CD drive. After only 5 minutes of config for networking I was up and on the 'net again…very impressed.

Anyone else have any retro software/hardware stories to share?

I had this same scenario a couple months ago, booted through my USB with the ISO image of Ubuntu 11.10 and back up in running in no time.

jaguar · 2012-03-30T08:40:36.000Z

I used to take all sorts electronics apart and poke them with wires and try to get them to do weird things, I’m pretty much impervious to electric shock now :]

craigkennedy0014 · 2012-03-30T10:09:30.000Z

Rbucajun wrote:

Gareth Choake:

One time, I got pissed with my PC and booted the front of the case. Moments later, Windows packed a mental and fell over. Turns out I managed to dislodge the HDD’s power cable.

violence and electronics dont make very good friends.

The technical term is percussive maintenance

bill-reid · 2012-03-30T11:56:32.000Z

Alex1318 wrote:

had a few dead hard drives this week…

there must be something in the air

I agree - I’ve had several bad drives this month - very out of character.

josh-cunning · 2012-03-30T13:02:31.000Z

I seem to recall way back in 80s actually hear of fix for a clicking or stuck hard drive involving sticking a pencil in the drive to fix it. I also second Mangus on those WD large format drives I have several of them go out on me. I have a 200gig drive that about 5 year ago gave the click of dead and couldn’t read from it so I froze in the freezer and it has worked fine every since.

johnwhite · 2012-03-30T16:25:39.000Z

Is there some kind of Community metric which describes the amount of time between someone mentioning a hard drive problem and someone suggesting putting it in the freezer?

MTTFS - Mean Time To Freezer Suggestion

coreymeans6915 · 2012-03-30T19:53:59.000Z

I remember a particularly bad series of Gateway machines that came with Quantum Fireball HDDs (appropriate name). They gave us the ol click of death about 2 weeks after the 3 year warranties ran out.

I found that I could swap the board with a working identical drive, and many times it would spin up and let me get data off.

Might not always work, but worth a shot!

andreasschmidt4059 · 2012-04-04T08:19:39.000Z

Alex1318 wrote:

had a few dead hard drives this week…

there must be something in the air

Indeed. Maybe more sun-storms.

I lost 2 hard drives and a SSD in 2 weeks.

God bless all backups were in place and data was secure but I did the fun part and put one (no not the SSD) into the freezer to exercise the worst case scenario. What shall I say it really worked.

So I thought to do a scientific proofed cross test with the second harddrive but must admit I forget it over night and on the next morning it was (maybe still) unusable. Scientific proof failed due to ID10T error.

BTW am I the only one feeling that HDD prices are still outrageous at the moment?

chris2624 · 2012-04-05T10:19:56.000Z

RS6 wrote:

in 10 years never had a dead drive

Same here, knock on wood. LOL

bizdps · 2012-04-06T11:09:56.000Z

TruLAN wrote:

No clicking, but I have heard shrieking coming from a hard drive. Not just a mild whine either, but a full-blown screech that echoed through half the building. Turns out a ball-bearing had gone bad and was scraping against something as the drive turned. Pink lubricant leaked everywhere and I only just managed to save the user’s personal photos and music before it overheated and blew up.

That was a fun day.

One of the drives in our file server is making that noise a couple times a week, but I can’t pinpoint it to replace it.

craigkennedy0014 · 2012-04-10T03:27:39.000Z

BizDPS wrote:

One of the drives in our file server is making that noise a couple times a week, but I can’t pinpoint it to replace it.

Hi BizDPS, what make/model of HDD are they and do they support SMART?

magnus369 · 2012-04-10T03:32:36.000Z

Rbucajun wrote:

Gareth Choake:

One time, I got pissed with my PC and booted the front of the case. Moments later, Windows packed a mental and fell over. Turns out I managed to dislodge the HDD’s power cable.

violence and electronics dont make very good friends.

I dunno, 10 gauge + stack of older mac laptops (that some git installed parallels on) == interesting way to get to know mac.

bizdps · 2012-04-10T03:35:44.000Z

If I recall offhand, they’re HP hot-plug 10K RPM 146GB SCSI drives. I would imagine they have SMART.

craigkennedy0014 · 2012-04-10T05:01:05.000Z

BizDPS wrote:

If I recall offhand, they’re HP hot-plug 10K RPM 146GB SCSI drives. I would imagine they have SMART.

Hi BizDPS. There are a few apps which will report the SMART status of your disks and this may shine light on which disk is failing. Obviously HP have their own diag tools which you can get from their site.

If you call their support desk for replacement they will ask you to do this anyway.

Alternatively, there are free and paid utilities which will report the SMART information. Many of these want you to boot from a live disk which I understand is not possible as this is a live file server so DIY DataRecovery HD Workbench or one of the alternatives will give you access from Windows.

HD workbench used to cost but it is now released as freeware (reg keys available on their site and no, I am not affiliated).

Does anyone else have any suggestions for HDD diag tools?

One thing to note about HP which we learned the hard way: if you need to send back the disk to HP, unless you paid extra for the HDD retention they will keep it.

If none of these tools help, as a last ditched attempt you can remove each disk in turn to find out which is screaming. This obviously depends on your raid setup. If you do try this, It’s one disk at a time and PLEASE ALLOW THE RAID ARRAY TO REBUILD BEFORE REMOVING SUBSEQUENT DISKS!!!

nathanmckeever4659 · 2012-04-10T09:45:28.000Z

Click of death is one thing… the shrieking of death described above I never want to hear again. Walked in the server room one morning and it was painful to even hear it. It was a seagate 1.5TB that the RAID card stopped seeing, but was still audibly running. Luckily everything here is in RAID and also backed up nightly. Replacement drive from Seagate is working fine… hope I never hear that noise again!

craigkennedy0014 · 2012-04-10T09:48:51.000Z

Capt. Obvious wrote:

Click of death is one thing… the shrieking of death described above I never want to hear again. Walked in the server room one morning and it was painful to even hear it. It was a seagate 1.5TB that the RAID card stopped seeing, but was still audibly running. Luckily everything here is in RAID and also backed up nightly. Replacement drive from Seagate is working fine… hope I never hear that noise again!

Definitely enough to make your sphincter twitch at the thought alone!

bizdps · 2012-04-10T19:59:00.000Z

Thanks for the advice. The disk’s been doing this for about 4 years or so(and still running properly). There’s less than a year left before we phase that server out, so I’m not particularly worried. As far as individually pulling drives out, I had considered that, but would like to not have to rebuild the array unless necessary. It’s RAID5 (we were young, naive admins back then).

craigkennedy0014 · 2012-04-11T03:43:50.000Z

BizDPS wrote:

Thanks for the advice. The disk’s been doing this for about 4 years or so(and still running properly). There’s less than a year left before we phase that server out, so I’m not particularly worried. As far as individually pulling drives out, I had considered that, but would like to not have to rebuild the array unless necessary. It’s RAID5 (we were young, naive admins back then).

Well… Fingers crossed it should see you through

4 years of screaming torure each time you walk in to the server room? You are made of stronger stuff than this old Scotsman lol

Good luck with it.

johnwhite · 2012-04-11T14:40:44.000Z

BizDPS wrote:

Thanks for the advice. The disk’s been doing this for about 4 years or so(and still running properly).

The screaming sound? In production? For 4 years? Don’t wait to replace that.

bizdps · 2012-04-11T17:37:38.000Z

The scream comes and goes. We don’t go in the server room much, except to periodically make sure everything’s on and that there are no amber or red lights.

It’s a 6-year old file server. It’s not worth investing money in. if it goes, I’ll do one or more of the following:

Replace the drive.
Move up replacing the server.
Move the data to a CIFS share on one of our NASs and not even bother with replacing the server.

The backups are working wonderfully. Users have me restore far more frequently than I’d like. Yes, hindsight says that I should have addressed this while it was still under warranty.

Edit: Unless I’m mistaken, I run the same risk whether the drive fails or I pull it out to replace it.