Eblo

MythTv ist kaput!

For a few months, smartd has been letting me know that the boot drive on my MythTV box was getting up in years - it's a 160 GB drive and I got it when those were about $150. I don't remember when that was, but it's been a few years and the thing runs 24/7/365. Anyway, I promptly ordered a 500 GB drive to replace it when those were about $150, but have yet to install it. It was going to be somewhat complicated because LVM spans to that drive. I don't have time. Etc. Etc.

This past weekend, MythTV crashed hard and wouldn't reboot. When attempting power cycles, I heard the dreaded "Click of Death" of a drive that doesn't know its ass from a hole in the ground. Damn.

At the time, we were heading out to early Christmas with the in-laws and I'd been up all night, coincidentally, recovering stuff off a failed external backup drive. So I didn't have it in me to deal with it at the time. I removed the offending/clicking drive, threw it in the freezer, and did my best to forget about it (yes, I know the freezer trick is unlikely to do any good in this case, but it doesn't hurt to try).

A few days later, I had some time to throw the remaining drives into a freshly installed Debian box to survey the landscape and see if my system backups were intact - there's a relatively new 320 GB drive in there as well with 100 GB set aside for music files and the rest reserved for backup files. I've got rsync scripts which mirror stuff from my local linux boxes to there. My hope was to get to the backups, mirror it to the 500 GB replacement drive, hack LILO a bit, and hopefully be back up and running.

Imagine my surprise when I mounted the non-LVM partitions and found the /, /usr/, /var/, and /home/ partitions intact! So wait, what? WHICH DRIVE IS IN THE FREEZER THEN? Sure as shit, the drive which failed was the MP3 drive. The backup drive. The NEWEST drive which has NEVER thrown a SMART error. WTF? The up-side is that - yay, my MythTV video files were safe because my LVM partitions are still around. And yay, I still have all of the original CDs we've owned and the stuff I've purchased digitally is for the most part also on my laptop AND on my iPod. But the bummer is that unless I can pull the files off my iPod with Amarok, which I may, I'll have to re-rip all those CDs. I'll also lose an ass-tonne of podcasts, grey-market MP3s, and random things I stashed on that drive 'temporarily,' like rips of DVDs for transfer to our iPods. Also, backups. Gone.

But wait, there's more!!!
(but I never finished this post)