After the Gentoo updates a bit of personal updates, as I really need to write again about this, as maybe other people will take that into account in the future.
One of the problems I had to join Gentoo was that, when Jan, Otavio and Aaron asked me to join, I hadn’t had a Gentoo/Linux system. Not that I never had one, but my system broke just a week before, and took three weeks having the new amd64 box here.
What happened to my box? Eh, a bad thing. At the start of February the OpenBSD box I used as DNS, mail server and IRC Bouncer died, because of a power spike; at the end of the same month, after rebooting the Gentoo box I got a unreadable HDD, from which I was able to retrieve just a fraction of all the data stored.
That disk had a bit of a story behind it: I ordered a Maxtor 160GB EIDE, but they sent me a Maxtor 160GB SATA (costing a bit more).. but I hadn’t had a SATA controller on that machine. Fortunately my sister bought me a Promise TX4 SATA controller, which worked fine until the disk died.
That said, I started looking for information about how that disk died, as the power spike wasn’t responsible for it this time. I then found out that the same problem happened to a couple of friends of mine, and one of them, calling Maxtor, was told that the problem was in a Maxtor’s fault in design of the 160GB models which dies when writing somewhere between 140GB and the end of the disk.
I then sent the disk to be RMAed, but now, 5 months later, it’s going to come back without replacement because “Maxtor’s software doesn’t find problems, so Maxtor doesn’t recognize any kind of problem I have”. Initializing the disk with Maxtor’s software sets the size of the disk to 140GB to Windows’s enquiries… Linux instead ignore that software and just see 160GB which makes it unusable for my purposes. I’ll just give that disk to my sister, and leave the Promise controller alone without disk connected to it (because the new machine has already 4 SATA channels, two of which are connected to two 160GB SAMSUNG disks.
On a side note, I started new (personal) blog in Italian for Italian readers 😉 Just for fun I also created a wishlist in Froogle… I know nobody is going to look at it 🙂
