Char Jackson
Sat, 02 Dec 2017
05:13:10 GMT in alt.windows7.general, wrote:

On Sat, 2 Dec 2017 03:05:15 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

On the "we're all different" theme:

In message , Char
Jackson writes:
[]
True, but I weigh that against the enormous inconvenience of
optical media. CD-Rs are completely out of the question for data
storage, I hope you'll agree, but even single layer DVD's with
their ~4.5GB storage are a non-starter for me. That doesn't even
hold a movie unless you forego the HD versions, which I'm not
willing to do. Also, I don't have pockets big enough to hold
discs.

Least with optical you can often retrieve a
lot of it

Things must have really changed since I exited the stage. I've
never, not once, heard of a case where you could retrieve part of
a damaged disc. It has always been all or nothing, in my
experience.

It ought to be possible in theory, just as with magnetic discs.

AFAIK, if the TOC is damaged or corrupt, the disc is toast.

Nope. That's actually a copy protection 'trick' once deployed on
commercial audio cds for a period of time. You can still get the data
off the disc. I've ripped more than one copy protected audio cd that
intentionally corrupted the toc so a computer drive would have
problems with it, but a normal audio only cd player wouldn't.

Yes, there's a bit of a difference between how your computers optical
drives treat inserted media vs that of your old audio cd player. And
various pressing plants at the request/demand of some record labels
took full advantage of it. The disc would play just fine in your
normal cd player, but, would give your computer fits and in some
cases, your car stereo as well. And with some macs, because they
didn't have a physical eject button (or the pinhole manual override)
would get 'stuck' in the drive.

I don't personally consider internal drives to be at significant
risk. I'm going to need some really bad experiences before I
change my mind. I think external drives are at a much higher risk.
I know most folks here won't agree with that, but that's what my
experience has shown me.

I recently had one of my linux machines go down on me, the 500gb wd
drive developed bad sectors on the super block of all places. That
machine is back online now, but it was a real ****er recovering data
from the drive. Luckily, there wasn't anything on it that I didn't
have stored in multiple other locations, but I was surprised that it
failed in the manner in which it did and what a bitch it was to get
anything from it as a result. Even the backup superblock wasn't any
help.

Oh, and I got no advanced warning of any kind that there was a
problem with the drive. It was fine one day, being replaced the next.
I found out the computer had a problem when I tried to access it as I
normally do from another one, no response. Which was unusual as my
machines tend to be very stable critters. So I went to the box itself
and wiggled the mouse, no response but I noticed the HD light was
solid. Waited a few minutes, couldn't get a response via keyboard or
mouse so opted for reset button. That's when I got an education in
how linux does if the boot region of the hard disk is physically
damaged. Booting off of usb stick got me back to a console prompt so
I could do some investigating and that's when I discovered I had a
few bad blocks (4 total on the entire drive... sigh) and the
superblock was affected in a most bad way. As in, destroyed. Which is
very very bad for Linux.

All that being said, that's the first HD failure I've experienced in
atleast five years. The few I suffered previously I knew in advance
by the sounds of the drive, smart failure warnings, or, checking on
the drives internal memory of bad/remapped sectors that the drive was
going south, but, I had time to get my stuff before it did. In this
particular case, no warning.

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