This one time, at band camp, Nori Heikkinen said: > 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? It is possible that the spindles in the hard drives could have been damaged from excessive cold. Random reboots and freezes (no pun intended) certainly sounds like hardware failure. Try the usual things, I guess: memtest, cpuburn, hdparm. Stressing the various components will give you an idea where the failure is, at any rate. Note - really, really, only stress the drives in single user mode. Even then, I'd back up before hand. I'm not aware of a good test for motherboard failure, but perhaps someone else could help here. > 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? Seems to be. See what the tests show up. > 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? Do you have any room available on another box? I do a nightly backup from cron and then scp it over to the other box. About once a week or so, I burn the latest of these backups to disc. Of course, I don't have any data that anyody's life depends on - I'm sure if you check Alvin Olga's site, he'll have a ton of recommendations for backing up data. Good luck, and hope you have a merrier Christmas. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Stephen Gran | In the next world, you're on your own. | | steve@lobefin.net | | | http://www.lobefin.net/~steve | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Attachment:
pgp3a4mZoRXWD.pgp
Description: PGP signature