My hard drive seems to be playing tricks on me. Now I'm paranoid.

It started this evening when I decided to reboot Argo in an attempt to diagnose some annoying low level buzzing coming from my sound card. (I have way too many Y-adaptors daisy-chained onto it, but I wanted to power cycle to see if that would clear it up; turns out it didn't).

When I rebooted again, fdisk gave that annoying "/dev/hda* has not been checked in 182 days, check forced" message. So I sit and wait while it does this through several partitions, but when it gets to the drive that is mounted on /home (an entirely separate physical disk), the whole thing just stops. Frozen. With the hard disk access light stuck in the On indicator.

I wait a few minutes. Nothing. No progress. No indication that anything is being done. Hard drive access light on.

Eventually, I become impatient and reboot. It progresses through the boot sequence, this time skipping all the other partitions (because their checks were completed just a few minutes ago), but again freezes when it tries to check /dev/hde1.

So I pull out my gentoo boot cd, boot up to the cd, mount the hard drive's root partition, change /etc/fstab to comment out /dev/hde, and reboot again from the hard drive.

Since it is no longer trying to mount anything to /home, the system boots to a login prompt, so now I can at least nose around a bit. I attempt to mount /dev/hde1 on /home manually. The mount proceeds without error, and I am able to access my data.

I unmount it, and attempt to run fsck from the command line. (In theory, fsck should almost never be needed for an ext3 file system, but I am still curious as to why it was freezing up during boot.) During the very first pass (which normally goes very quickly), fsck just stops dead. Hard drive light on, just like it was during boot. I'm able to CTRL-C it, which brings back the command prompt, and I can again mount the drive without any apparent problems.

But now I'm worried, because I can't help but wonder if this is the beginning of a potentially painful hardware failure. It would be extra painful if I lost what's stored in /home, because much of what's there isn't backed up anywhere. (I know, I know, bad practice.) If it is hardware, it's especially annoying because that SATA drive is the newer of the drives in my system. But as we all know, newer does not necessarily equal better quality.

(It would be much less painful for me to lose the older drive, since most of the data there is just a reinstall away.)

I'm contemplating running out to buy a big new drive tomorrow to backup everything over to "just in case". Even at allofmp3.com prices, I've got over $100 worth of music on the drive that I don't have backed up anywhere else, not to mention the mounds of files containing stuff I've created personally over the years.

A very strange issue. Maybe Argo knows it's Halloween and is trying to give me a good scare. Not funny, Argo.