Peregrine

It hasn’t been very long since I upgraded the storage on my home file server. One evening last week while I was in Los Angeles, my wife told me that there was a “funny” sound coming from the “server room”. Her description made me think it was a fan. Oh, how I wish that had been the case.

Saturday, after I was home I had tried to access some files on the file server and couldn’t. I tried to log into it via SSH and that hung. I logged in as root on it’s console without problems. A df worked fine, but trying to access anything mounted from the new drive’s LVs failed, hanging the command indefinitely. Trying to shutdown the box also failed as it hung on trying to unmount those volumes. I used the good-ol-power-switch to kill it, waited for everything to stop spinning and tried to start it up. The drive controller can’t even make sense of the drive. I simply powered the box down and left it that way for the weekend.

Tonight, I’ll be pulling the new drive out. I’ll hook it up to my home workstation (only other SATA box I currently have) and see if the drive will run. If so, I’m still not putting it back in the server. Instead, I’ll verify everything, wipe it and run it hard to try to fail it again. Even if I can’t get it to fail again, I’m still going to get an RMA and have it replaced. I think I’ll grab 1 or 2 more while I’m at it and set up either RAID 1 or RAID 5.

Let the hard drive games begin, I guess.