I've had hard drives die before, but this one seems to be doing it in an especially pathological way. It started with the kernel throwing irq timeout errors and then stepped up into actual read errors, culminating in a corrupt journal, a read-only block device and a forced fsck. It's been behaving a little better since then, though occasional io stalls (without any kernel error) suggest that it's having to repeatedly retry some sectors. SMART says it's all fine, so obviously I'm backing it all up now before a new disk arrives tomorrow and I can sort out access to the data centre. Email might be a bit spotty for me until then.

Turns out that running a 2.5" PATA drive for approximately 4 straight years may not have been the best of ideas. Who'd have guessed?

Syndicated 2009-06-25 21:38:42 from Matthew Garrett