Tonight, during an emerge -e system (to complete a GCC 4.2 transition), Enterprise’s hard disk started failing on me. /usr got unmounted while merging xcb-util back into the live fs, and quite some fiddling didn’t bring anything useful.
After running xfs_repair from SystemRescueCD, I ended up without /usr/lib64. The files are there, in lost+found, but the directory hierarchy is long gone.
This means that Enterprise, my main box, is now offline. Luckily /home is safe under a software RAID1 that should cover even if one of the disks decide to give up. And in /home I keep basically everything but part of the PAM documentation (which anyway is in /var so it’s also fine from tonight’s failure).
Thanks to Javier (Paya) I now have a plan to restore the data tomorrow: I’ll check for the MD5 of the files in the Portage database, and then put every file where it belongs. The problem for this is that I first have to make sure that the disks aren’t dead on hardware-level, and I’m not sure how to do that.
Suggestion about that are welcome.
And as Joshua said.. what is this with my luck? Farragut’s disk died last week, this week it’s Enterprise’s, even if I run them with a LOT of fans to keep them cool. I suppose I should start NOT working during summer, and keep the computers offline.
Anyway bottomline is that you can’t expect stuff coming from me until I can do a surface check of the two disks and recover my data. And if one of the disks is faulty, I’m afraid you’ll have quite some time to wait till I get back — for a series of reason, I don’t want to run my main box counting on just one disk (and tonight has been a good demonstration of that). And for what it’s worth, I’m in a pinch even with Farragut, as I now don’t have a way to back up the content on another box.
This is what I hate of computers: maintenance costs.