[For those who don't know, IDE hard disks are hda=primary master, hdb=prim slave, hdc=secondary master, hdd=sec slave]

So this morning I woke up, checked my email, and... started hearing noises from hda. Ugh. fsck went nuts on the next reboot, as well as the next. All sorts of weirdness.

My dealer suspects a problem with this particular model of hard disk. IBM DTLA something... he says the platters used may be bad. Also suspects heat problem.

Now for the interesting bit. I seem to have recovered most of my Linux installation by installing RH6.1 temporarily on hdb, putting my old hda as hdd, and a new Seagate as hda. Created the partitions (somehow... egads, DOS fdisk, Linux fdisk, and Disk Druid simply do NOT play nice!), then mounted each of /, /home, and /usr (/var is on hdb and safe, and /lib is on /... I ought to separate it).

Used cp -ax to copy all the stuff from hdd to hda, on the appropriate partitions. One reboot later, everything came up... except postfix the Great Mail Server. Seems most of /etc/postfix ended up in /lost+found on the last fsck. So I hand-recovered the essentials, dumped the rest in /etc/postfix/lostfound, and restarted postfix. Voila. We're back in business.

Rest of the night will be spent in watching hda like a hawk, and rebooting hdd a few times to see if it's a transient problem.

Amazingly, hdb is a Quantum Bigfoot. I've had it for 3 years, and I've heard all sorts of bad things about it. hda I've had for < 1 year.

The name of the temporary installation? "bootstrap".