Fubared x2

As luck would have it, I had two hard drives go bad on me in the past month. One is a 60 GB Maxtor that is two years old and the other is an old Seagate 6.4 GB that was probably five years old when I got it 2-3 years ago. I'm irked about the Maxtor as it's so new and the other isn't that big of a loss. However, upon looking into what was on them, they were the only two drives that had some of Beck's backups AND most of the pictures I took this year, including pictures from the Pittsburgh Air Show and our trip to South Dakota. The Maxtor won't even boot and just clicks and clacks. The Seagate would boot, only with a boot floppy, and force fsck and give loads of errors. Eventually it would come up but I couldn't mount anything nor would it load any modules. Thus, I could not mount an NFS and copy over to another machine nor could I mount a USB drive and copy files over to that.

Luckily, I was able to use Knoppix to boot the system and see the data on the drive. I then copied over the backups and pictures to my USB drive. With Knoppix, you need to enable your USB device to be writable and that's easy to do: just left click on the device shortcut and select 'Actions' from the menu. From there you'll find where you can change the permissions. Yeah, I like the command-line for most stuff like this but the GUI way was what turned up when Allthewebbing.

So, I got what I needed and now I need to consider whether or not I'm going to ever buy a Maxtor drive again. Maxtor has since been acquired by Seagate so I don't know if the Maxtor name will disappear. I'd hate to buy a Seagate and find out it's a Maxtor with Seagate labeling. Maybe I'll give Western Digital another look next time I need a new hard drive.