So I processed the fireworks video the week after I watched them. However there was a big problem that occurred. I had the videos ready to be put onto the website and I had the video converted into a lossless h.264 file which took a day to compress. Then when I went to plug the drive into my main computer I first tried to plug the drive in correctly on the back of the case. My ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard came with an external connector for plugging in SATA drives. The panel doesn’t meet eSATA spec but I use it because of the convenience. Well my first attempt to plug in the molex connector was not successful and so I rotated it around and went to make another attempt to plug in the drive and then suddenly the computer turned off and there was a spark. Well the computer wouldn’t turn on and the drive was plugged in. My second attempt was an attempt of plugging the the drive in backwards which was unsuccessful. I got it plugged in correctly and the computer wouldn’t turn on. The power supply on the computer smelled like something got hot too. Well I thought that maybe the computer was dead but I unplugged the 300G hard drive and the computer turned on. I was glad that the power supply had short circuit protection. The short circuit protection saved me a lot of money. So far no smoke had been released. I plugged the 300G hard drive in again and immediately the computer turns off again. Still no smoke had been released.
Next step unplug the drive and try it in the other computer. The other computer was on and SATA is hot pluggable. I plugged in the hard drive and then smoke started spewing and the power supply of the second computer began to spin the power supply fans up to full speed. I unplugged as soon as I could think of doing this. The whole process took only a couple of seconds to unfold. So now smoke had been released from the hard drive.
Now I created a RMA for Seagate to have the drive replaced. Well the RMA process is easy but packing the drive was not easy. Seagate has very strict packaging requirements for their hard drives which cost me about as much to package the drive as it would for me to have bought a new drive. The cost of shipping the drive was about $35 which includes the packaging cost and shipping cost.
The data that was on the drive was far more important than the hardware which is how it typically is now. The big hard drives are storing hundreds and sometimes even thousands of dollars of purchased music, videos, and other data. Some of the data didn’t cost money but it cost a lot of time because it is an original work.
The drive arrived at Seagate and it took them about 4 days to notify receipt of the package in their system and then to ship a new hard drive. They shipped the drive on a Friday which because UPS doesn’t move packages on Saturday or Sunday meant that the package would just sit in the UPS warehouse near McAllen, Texas over the weekend. The drive made it to my place on the following Thursday. I opened it up and it was a different drive model. The drive was a Seagate 7200.10 instead of the 7200.9 that I sent in. That meant that the drive I received used the new PMR technology and so I decided to make that my main system drive. The drive was also an upgrade to 320G and a larger cache. So I prepared the drive my formating it and using the GUID partition table. I no longer use the MBR method.
I spent a couple of hours reading about how to properly partition the drive with GPT and then commenced on the partitioning. I then formatted the drive. Then I rebooted the computer and booted into a livecd and began the process of copying the OS. The copying of the OS appeared to be going well and no problems had been noticed. Well the copying finished and I went to install grub on the new hard drive with no luck. At that point I new something was fishy because I couldn’t recompile grub either. Well Kathryn was coming over to watch a movie that night and so I stopped what I was doing for a couple of hours and booted the computer on the new drive by using the grub on the old drive to load the system on the new drive. The boot went well however I still couldn’t load grub and I would get the error, “No such file or directory” while trying to load grub. I couldn’t compile the program either. All of the 64-bit binaries were working and that was the most important part for now.
I finished watching the movie, “The First Wives Club” and then recommenced work on figuring out the problem. I took some time to google the problem and I decided that there was something wrong with the toolchain. The toolchain includes binutils, gcc, glibc. I reinstalled binutils just fine but gcc wouldn’t compile. I then tried glibc and the problem was fixed. So I don’t know where the problem was but I did try to recopy the 32-bit libs from the old drive more than once and the problem persisted. Reinstalling glibc fixed the problem which to me means that the old drive may have been having some problems with data integrity.
So I decided to repartition my 1TB hard drive and format it with a new EXT4 partition. I stayed up late copying over the data to my new drive and then over to the old 200G hard drive. The copying went smooth and nothing to cause me concern. I was tired and went to bed while this went. I had also done a full format on the 200G hard drive using Seagate’s Seatools to make sure the drive was trustworthy and that if there were surface issues that the bad sectors would be remapped before I copied the files onto it.
I woke up the next morning and I deleted the old partition on the 1TB hard drive and then proceeded to repartition the drive. The gdisk tool by default aligns partitions on the 1MB boundary to account for the new drives that are reporting 512 byte sectors but really have 4092 byte sectors. Well I deleted the partition and when I went to format the drive the tool mkfs.ext4 said that the partition was still mounted. I unmounted the old partition and then proceeded with the format. After the format was done I copied all the files back onto the drive and everything looked good. I decided to reboot the computer just to make sure the 1TB drive which is my home drive would automatically mount. The mounting is done by the UUID and so if I mess that up the drive won’t mount at boot. Well the drive didn’t mount as expected and so I thought to myself what could have gone wrong. The first thing on my mind is that I didn’t get the UUID correct. Well I checked the the UUID didn’t show when I ran the tool blkid. The partition wouldn’t mount if I manually tried to mount by the device name directly and so now I knew that something was up. So then I tried to sent some commands to mount to try to force it to mount and no luck. I started to panic slightly because I had deleted the files off of my other drives by now since I thought everything went smoothly. Well I got onto the Gentoo IRC channel and asked for some emergency help. Someone suggested that I just redo the partition map and I tried that. I knew where the old partition started and OS I went and did that and made sure that the partition started at sector 63 which is standard for the old MBR partition scheme. I then went and attempted to mount again and I had success! Now I’m not out of a few hundred dollars and thousands of hours of personal time in original works.
I then redid the whole process of copying files off the drive to my two drives. I then redid the partition again and this time I didn’t have the problem of a home drive being mounted when it wasn’t supposed to be. I formated the drive and I had success there! I copied the files and had success again and now I have the partitions aligned on the 1MB boundary and new EXT4 file systems. It wasn’t very funny though thinking that I had lost all of my data. Now I’ve thought that eventually I might get a backup hard drive and store it in a vault. I was very relieved after the final successes and then reprocessed the fireworks videos last night.
P.S. Make sure to unmount the partition before repartitioning the drive. It’ll save a lot of stress and anxiety.