It all starts with that strange sound… In my machine’s case, a whining noise.  As a sysadmin and/or experienced geek, you know something’s wrong.  I suspect the head assembly has become detached and is scraping along the disk surface at 7200rpm… 

Naturally, the usual recovery tools don’t work… and the drive sounds shot.

# pvmove /dev/sdd1 /dev/sdg1
/dev/sdd1: Moved: 0.0%
/dev/sdd1: Moved: 0.0%
/dev/sdd1: read failed after 0 of 2048 at 0: Input/output error
No physical volume label read from /dev/sdd1
Physical volume /dev/sdd1 not found
ABORTING: Can’t reread PV /dev/sdd1
ABORTING: Can’t reread VG for /dev/sdd1

# dd if=/dev/sdd1 of=dev/sdg1 bs=4096
dd: reading `/dev/sdd1′: Input/output error
2+0 records in
2+0 records out
8192 bytes (8.2 kB) copied, 0.0992418 s, 82.5 kB/s

# dd if=/dev/sdd of=dev/sdg bs=4096
dd: reading `/dev/sdd’: Input/output error
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
4096 bytes (4.1 kB) copied, 0.0205753 s, 199 kB/s

This is the third 1TB Seagate ES.2 drive I’ve had develop bad sectors.  Although they have a 5 year warranty, they seem to start expiring after 3.

Thank goodness I have backups…

#whodoyoutrust