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koitsu
MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
Humax BGW320-500

koitsu to rockisland

MVM

to rockisland

Re: Multiple Hard Drives failing

Okay here's what I typed up / manually tested this morning:

Preparation
=============
Download via torrent (approx. 688MBytes):

»torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.d ··· .torrent

Burn ISO to CD, and boot CD

Initial setup
===============
Once GUI/desktop appears, wait for it to state that it's got a network connection. There should be a little pop-up in the bottom right of the screen that says "Connection Established".

If you never see such, then it means Linux probably doesn't have support for your NIC, which means we're basically screwed. Good times.

Adjust desktop size
=====================
First thing to do is probably increase the size of your desktop, since (at least for me) the default was 800x600 (but I'm using VMware w/out VMware Tools)...

In the taskbar (where the Windows XP Quick Launch area would be), on the far right there's an icon that looks like a thin-bezel LCD monitor. Click that and choose a resolution you prefer; I went with 1280x1024.

Package manager
=================
In the taskbar at the far left (where the Windows "Start" button would be), click whatever that thing is -- a silver hand? Airplane? I have no idea. Choose:

* Preferences -> Synaptic Package Manager

Close the "Quick Introduction" window, and close the "Granted permission without asking for password" window.

Once in the package manager, you need to tell it that you prefer "Unstable" software. The latest smartmontools (5.39.1) is considered an "unstable" package, even though it's an official release. The "stable" package is for version 5.38-1, which is somewhat old. We want the newest. There's no harm to your drives/disks by going with this, just FYI. So, choose:

* Settings -> Preferences -> Distribution tab
* Prefer versions from: unstable
* Click Apply
* Click OK

Now click the large "Reload" button. This will download an updated list of available packages (software) you can install.

Once done, click the large "Search" button near the upper-right of the window. Search for the string "smartmontools". You should be shown two results -- smart-notifier and smartmontools. It should be version 5.39.1+svn3060-1. Double-click smartmontools.

You'll be given a notice that tells you that the package manager needs to download other software which smartmontools depends on. Click the "Mark" button.

You'll be back in the main packaging application again. Now at the top of the window, click the large green "Apply" button. You'll be given a detail window of what's about to happen -- click Apply again.

Stuff will start downloading and installing to the RAM disk that your system has (remember, it's a LiveCD, so there's no changes written permanently). It shouldn't take long.

Once that's done, click Close, and then click the small "X" in the upper right corner of the package management window. You'll be back to the desktop.

Web browser
=============
Time to launch Knoppix's integrated browser called Iceweasel.

In the taskbar where the XP "Quick Launch" area would be, there's an icon that looks like a globe -- click that once, then use the browser like you normally would to go to www.dslreports.com, log in, blah blah.

Terminal window
=================
In the taskbar, somewhat near the centre, there's an icon that looks like a monitor with a cursor on it. Click that once and you'll be given a shell window (think cmd.exe!)

From here, you'll need to type the following commands and copy-paste the output here:

sudo smartctl -d sat -a /dev/sda
sudo smartctl -d sat -a /dev/sdb
sudo smartctl -d sat -a /dev/sdc
sudo smartctl -d sat -a /dev/sdd
sudo smartctl -d sat -a /dev/sdd
...and so on...

The "sudo" part tells Linux to run the command as root (think Administrator), otherwise it won't work.

The sda/sdb/etc. strings ARE NOT a typo -- you might think hda from trying on WIndows, but it's different under Linux -- SATA disks appear as part of the SCSI subsystem on Linux, except that smartmontools for Linux provides a passthrough driver so that you can speak native ATA commands to a device on the SCSI bus (technically it wraps the ATA commands in a SCSI CDB, and the passthrough driver knows what to do with that). That's what the "-d sat" argument does.

Eventually one of those commands should turn up something that says "Device Model: WDC WD5002ABYS-02B1B" which matches that of your non-RAID'd drive.

Copy-pasting text from the terminal window is as simple as it would be in Notepad.

You can shut the Knoppix/Linux system off in any way you want, though the nicest way is to use the taskbar and choose "Logout", then pick "Reboot" or "Power off" or whatever -- remember, it's a LiveCD, so nothing gets written to any hard disks.