[hoss]

I may as well tell my horror story. Some of you have probably read various posts from me trying to figure it out, but I will try to summarize it here.

It started when I decided to upgrade my computer from a P450, I think, to an Athlon 1200. Got a new ASUS A7V133 mobo and a new Maxtor hard drive. Transferred data from my Western Digital hard drive, but kept it as my second hard drive. After a week or so I strted getting various errors including hard drive errors then it failed to boot. Lost all my data. Reformatted and reinstalled 98SE and it did fine for a few days and the same thing happened. The third time it happened I Bought a new Maxtor hard drive because I was suspecting the drive of having problems, but the same thing happened. I think I replaced memory then and the same thing happened so I figured it had to be the mobo. Bought an ECS mobo and replaced with it. It ran for a few weeks with no problem. Walaa! It had to be the mobo. I got an RMA and sent it back for replacement. Things went great for six or eight months then Tax time came and I realized the Western Digital drive, tho still in the computer, was not plugged in or connected. I plugged the power to it and the IDE cable to look for my old tax files. Didn't find them, but went ahead and did my taxes and filed electronically. A couple days later my puter froze up and I restarted it, but it wouldn't boot. This time the new Maxtor drive was dead. Lost it all again. The Western Digital drive was still fine, but the Maxtor was very hot when I touched it.
So then it struck me that all the problems I had had before occurred only when I had the two drives stacked next to each other and powered up. It must have been the heat. I then installed a new Maxtor, but this time put my floppy between the two hard drives for testing purposes and never had another problem.

After so many disk losses I decided to get a raid controller and mirror my drives. Got another identical 30GB Maxtor and set up the mirroring. After making a backup copy on a third drive, I stacked the mirrored Maxtors next to each other and have never had a problem from them. So now I wonder if the WD put out more heat, or if it caused some magnetic interference with the Maxtors. Needless to say, I won't use the WD next to another hard drive again. Thats all I have to say about that.

[dlt]

Great story, Hoss...glad you figured it out. I had a similar problem in my old pc after I installed a Yamaha cd-rw drive, but I was able to pinpoint all my problems on the drive running too hot. I found out later that was a known problem...

[Weaver]

I will revive this thread from a couple of months of silence. Another horror story, this one still fresh in the grinder. Just yesterday as a matter of fact, I was doing some maintenance on some directories and files that should not be accessible by regular users. The machine is my main webserver, my baby, weaver.dwave.net. Anyways, I meant to issue the command:

chmod -R 700 ./

to change the permissions to rwx for root only. But instead, I was in a hurry (like usual) and missed the period...

chmod -R 700 /

Anyone who has ever used chmod knows that this is going to change the permissions recursively (all files and folders underneath) to 700. Now this isn't so bad when the directory you want to recursively change is ./ (the current directory); but when you miss a period and instruct chmod to start at / (root directory) and change permissions, it is a different story.

Needless to say, I hit ^C as soon as I realized what was happening, but it was too late, the damage was already done. I tried to make myself feel better by saying that I needed to built a faster web server anyways. So that is what I am doing as we speak, installing Slack 8.1 on a PIII 700 and trying to transfer the contents of the old webserver to the new one.

All because of a missed keystroke...

-Weaver

[hoss]

Yikes! That is a horror. I would normanny type chmod -R 700 . tho instead of the "./" But then the "/" is just one key away from the "." so it can happen to the best of us.

[Weaver]

I never even thought about just using a dot ( . ) You get into a rhythm and you never take a step back so see if you can make your rhythm. I think mine stems from the days of yor when I was young buck typing in the ../ in html.

You are right though, in this case, the . and the / are right next to each other, so a mistyped stroke may result in the same situation as mine. I appreciate the sympathy.

BTW, I have just finished installing sendmail and the new webserver should be up by the weekend. Thanks

-Weaver