Annual Hard Disk Crash

Last year around about this time I had a hard disk crash and a mother board stew. So I wasn't at all suprised when one of the three hard disks plugged into my machine decided to go on strike.

Well it wasn't really the hard disk's fault or my fault. It's the UPS's fault. The UPS of course would point the fingure back at me and say it's my fault for letting the battery run out. Anyway as often happens in this part of the world; the lights failed and when the came back on less than a minute later the machine refused to boot.

Grub got stuck attempting to load a 1.5 stage? WTF is the 1.5 stage? anyway the system always gave an error5 and refused to go any further. The usual remedy of booting off an installer CD and going into rescue mode to run grub-install didn't work. What's really annoying is that all the partitions on the disk and the data contained in them appear to be intact. It's just sector zero that's causing trouble.

Next tried to run the installer in update mode (my system is Fedora Core 4) after going through the entire process the $^&[email protected] installer says boot loader was not updated because no kernel modules were updated.

After playing around for quite a bit more including booting with knoppix to run grub-instal again and trying various remedies mentioned on various forums I decided to try out a fresh install. Unfortunately that didn't work either. The same error message kept appearing even after a fresh installation of FC 4.

Finally I decided to throw in the towel and buy a new hard disk. In the software business time really is money. I shouldn't have spent so many hours trying to get to the bottom of this disk failure. It's only 40 GB disk anyway. So went into a computer shop and bought a brand new 120GB hard disk and while I was at it digged a bit deeper into the pockets to pick up a DVD writer as well.

All this happened on saturday and I am still playing catch up.