I really Rube Goldberged that box. At an appointed time, it would pull code from a no longer existing svn repo, build and package it, toggle the next partition in grub then reboot into the next distro. Process repeated until all four distros had their run. You could ftp or svn into the box and grab packages as needed.

Wow. An Athlon XP that was about as fast as you could get without going Xeon fifteen years ago is…not as fast as I remembered.

This build cycle will be going on until well after I am home and in bed.

So far so good

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In the days before on demand VMs, this machine, via Cron and some oddball init levels, would reboot itself into four different distros and perform nightly builds. I just turned it on for the first time in twelve years to see what would happen

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I'm putting it off until this weekend. I'd like some normalcy for the rest of the week.

mdadm still tries to copy the bad sectors. Game over. I just slapped two new drives in and started a new installation. I'll plop the old drive back in when it is done so the services are up. Early tomorrow morning, I will suck the data off and import it into the new raid volume.

This is going to be the tedious method I was trying to avoid.

At 99.35%, I have hit wall to wall errors. Hopefully, it doesn't take longer than an hour to slog through it. And, hopefully, the bad blocks are marked and ignored when I try to mirror. If not…Brute force time.

I know his home address. Unfortunately, it is over 1000 miles away.

Meh. Simple drive mirror with a hot spare ready and waiting in the case. That's how THIS one was but someone apparently took that drive and repurposed it elsewhere. He doesn't work here now so I can't strangle him.

Nothing wrong with the machine. The problem is that it cannot be down during anyone's normal business hours as it contains authentication data for an application of ours. (A decision I was not fond of but I wasn't in charge when it was made)

The way I am doing it means a simple plugging in of the failing drive and it's up in one minute.

The drive's bad spots are at the very stinking end of the partition. No data there.