Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

If you're connecting it to your system with an IDE cable straight to the motherboard, you may be running into an issue with the system not seeing all of the files, if you've gone over about 137 gigabytes...sometimes the controller on the motherboard isn't set up for drives over that size. After that amount of data, performance might get flaky. (If the drive is pre-formatted before you put it into the system, Windows will probably report 200GB but may not know what to do with the last 63 or so gigs, reliably, when it's writing to the drive.)

If it's a serial ATA drive or an external drive, this doesn't apply.

I have a SMART failure thing detection thing on my hard disc, after the BIOS screen, before windows begins to start up.

I was backing-up everything to reformat the drive and reinstall windows, anyway. I did so, hoping the detection thing would just go away but it has not.

is a failure inevitable? is there no way to fix/stop it? should I just replace the disc straight away? the only reason I have not already got a new disc is that it is a laptop and a new 80Gb drive will be almost £100.

thanks.

http://www.lavalys.com/products.php?lang=en

That will give you SMART information, is your laptop still in warranty?

but 1st off make sure any irreplacable docs are backed up ASAP.

05 / Reallocated Sector Count / 50 / 1 / 1 / 1022 / Pre-Failure: Imminent loss of data is being predicted

any idea what this means?

I have everything backed-up to an external disc and, also, to DVDs.

it is just under a year into its two year warranty.

problem is...I have a ton of work, at the moment and up until june, and cannot risk sudden problems or waiting for "repairs". I wish I could just buy a new disc and they would compensate me.

thank you.

Depending on your warranty type they will probably want the whole laptop back, and if you replace the disk yourself you could invalidate your current warranty in someway (breaking a sticker or something)

Give them a call and ask them what the warranty procedure involves for a knackered HDD.

I have had the warning for about four or five days, now, but it is still running fine, at the moment.

I had hoped there would be a way to just format and completely and reset any probs.

oh, well!

thanks, again.

It's a good idea to get it sorted whilst the laptop is in the warranty period.

I cannot afford to send it away, for repairs, though.

I have, just recently, formatted and reinstalled windows--the only space used is by windows and a couple of applications and drivers--I have no files on it, now.

so, say, less than 3Gb used.

(go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management - Disk Manager is in the tree under the Storage node)

(unless you use a non-destructive partitioning program like Partition Magic, of course)

Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management

If it does, you should be able to assign a drive letter to it here. I don't follow why you would need to use a special program to recover data from the disk... It should still be there.

I need to compare two folders and delete from the first folder everything that also exists in the second folder. I can't find a flag in rsync for doing this it's not really what it's for. Any ideas anyone?

cd to second folder
find . -printf "rm -i /firstfolder/%P\n"

pipe this to a file then run the file (can do this in one go but i always check the output just in case). will delete everything in first folder that has the same name as that in the second folder

will give you a list of common(ly named) files

in any case, i would recommend getting into the bios settings at bootup and see if the computer sees the drive on that level, before even getting into windows

also are the jumpers on the drives set correctly for their positions on the ide channels? (is the slave drive set to slave or auto)

1) write the list of commands in a file
2) put this at the top:

#!/bin/bash

or, more generically, "#!" followed by the path to the shell you want to use.

(-d stops rsync recursing)

xpost

> How do I turn a list of commands into a shell script?

you don't need to, really. just

sh file_full_of_commands

btw chmod +x file_full_of_commands makes it executable

does the copying with no intermediate file.
the {} token in rsync command will expand to the found directory.

I lost the data by converting the disk from Dynamic to Basic - I had it all backed up though so no problem. Have assigned a letter to it and will be using it purely for sharing media. Thanks to Caitlin and Keef for the help here.

Any ideas?

Unplug the mouse, login and plug it in again.