due to circumstances beyond my control, my computer has spend much of
the past four days in the trunk of various cars schlepping 1000 miles
across the frozen Midwest. i've done this lots of times before, but
usually the trip takes half as long, and is much colder.
this time, though, i got my computer home, plugged it in, and it
appears to be suffering from some kind of degenerative disease. it
boots up -- sometimes. half the time it doesn't even engage, and when
LILO does pop up and loads Linux, it's always in order to fsck every
partition, because of course it wasn't cleanly unmounted last time --
the thing (unattended, it appears) will crash within the half hour.
take this time for example. it just took 10 or 15 minutes checking
every inode of every partition, modified file structures of two, and
then loaded X. i'm now writing this email, but i'm going to shut the
computer down as soon as i've looked into burning a couple CDs of
data. i haven't stuck around long enough yet to see it shut down
while it's in use (and i hope it won't!), but this is really worrying
me.
i have a couple questions, one of which is rather open-ended. what do
you think could have caused this? was it the cold? do hard drives
poo from being frozen?
does this one appear to be legitimately dying? do i need to look into
getting a new one now as opposed to the 6 months or more i was going
to wait?
and, perhaps most importantly -- what's the best way to do backups?
[1] i have abou 4 or 5 gig of data here i would absolutely hate to
lose. right now i'm going through and making iso images of it all and
then burning it to CD in chunks ... any better suggestions, or methods
for systematic regular backups in the future?
thanks a lot ...
</nori>
[1] of course i should have have been backing up all along! this has
been on my to-do list for a while ... it is right now top priority.
--
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