On Saturday 08 October 2011 22:10:36 Timothy Pearson wrote:
On Saturday 08 October 2011 19:41:56 Mag. Dr. Nikolaus Klepp wrote:
Well, looks like the harddrive. Get a drive now, your's could fail
any
second.
I have one on order!
Lisi
In my experience if the drive is going to die completely it will do so without much warning. The bad sectors you are experiencing are more like a cancer (dying R/W heads, bad disk surface, one or more head crashes in the past, etc.) and will continue to spread. The less you use the disk the better, as each write access will likely corrupt more sectors.
Thanks, Tim. I can't afford to not use my main workhorse this week, so I must just be extra careful with backups of my important data. Would it be likely to help if I keep the box running permanently instead of shutting down over-night etc.?
Lisi
It depends on the failure mode. If it is a mechanical failure (IMHO less likely with your symptoms) then keeping the box on 24/7 prevents sudden mechanical death at power-on. If it is bad disk material, then shutting the box down overnight will lessen the amount of corruption from the OS normally writing its files to the disk.
Tim