by Hello,
I am concerned with a strange sound coming from one of my hard drives when using
FreeBSD-2.1.5. Here is a brief background description.
I have two Maxtor IDE hard drives on the wd0 controller. Both the Master and Slave
drives are set with dual partitions, DOS/Win95 and FreeBSD. The beginning portions
of each drive are dedicated to DOS/FreeBSD and the later sectors are
dedicated to FreeBSD. The FreeBSD operating system that I use actually
resides on disk wd0, and a large root partition (obtained through the sysinstall
facility of the FreeBSD on wd0) resides on disk wd1. The reason I have this
setup as opposed to one OS per drive is that I want the wd1 drive to act as a
backup for both opperating systems. I have had to reinstall FreeBSD too many times
from floppies, due to corruption problems with msdosfs, to not have fast backups
available. I have no SCSI controllers that support tape drives and I am told that
floppy tape drive support is slow and is not very reliable under FreeBSD.
Hence the best backup solution for me for both DOS and Win95 was to have two
independent drives with DOS and FreeBSD; one primary (wd0), and one backup (wd1).
Here's the problem. From FreeBSD, I mount my wd1 drive to perform backup storage
operations:
mount -rw -t ufs /dev/wd1s2 /mnt
Again, the second drive, wd1 has a single large root partition (/dev/wd1s2a and
nothing else) starting from a sector somewhere in the middle of the drive, and
ending at the last sector of the drive.
I periodically hear a relatively loud and unhealthy sounding click (or it may be described
as a scratch) coming from the drive. This sound does not occur on the primary hard drive
on wd1 where I normally would run FreeBSD. It does not occur when accessing the DOS
partition on wd1s1 from the Win95 operating system on wd0s1. The sound only occurs when I
mount wd1s2 and perform backup operations from the FreeBSD on wd0d2. I had previously had a
refurbished hard drive containing the
/dev/wd1s2 partition, but it died very quicky (fortunately for me within the short warranty
period). That drive made the same scratching noises I hear now. The latest hard drive I have
has lasted quite some time like this, but the sound is disconcerting. Any thoughts?
Thanks So Much,
J. Metcalf
PS. I thought that maybe switching the order of the FreeBSD residence on the wd1 hard drive
might help. In other words, install the FreeBSD portion at the beginning of the drive , and
the DOS portion at the end. Would this be a waste of time with respect to this problem?