Partially dead drive

[Paul King]

|| I felt I needed to mention that because I may have set a partition 
|| boundary during resizing in a way that closed off a file or cut it 
|| off. I could be wrong.
|
| How did you resize?  I hope it wasn't just fdisking to set another
boundary.

I resized using the native tools that came with the Mint install, and later 
Ubuntu Studio install (which does not use Unity). The triple boot trick 
worked up until the next kernel update of Ubuntu Studio, when a manual 
rewrite of the grub menu became necessary (Mint was not detected). I never 
got around to it, being too busy with work. Both linuxes used the same
/home, 
/tmp, swap and /boot partitions. For a while I  thought it was a pretty neat

experiment, both are Debian-based, and both seemed to get along. This was
done 
about 4 months ago, and Ubuntu menu issue over a month ago, and the NTFS 
failure was in the past 2 weeks.

The only consequence I could see for the menu issue was that I couldn't boot

into Mint. So, being busy with other things, I didn't consider it 
life-threatening enough to fix.

| Programs meant to do resizing must understand the filesystem in question 
| and manipulate it to allow resizing.  gparted does this, for example.  
| Partition Magic was the first popular commercial tool to do this.  The
task 
| is tricky enough that PM was considered, umm, magical when it first came
out.

Well, hopefully that means that the weird partitioning I did, using
well-used 
Linux tools, didn't cause the problem. Hopefully.

| If you used a suitable tool, you would not have cut off a file.
| Unless it was buggy: then all bets are off.

Well, I didn't use anything non-standard, and nothing like FDISK. All the 
tools I used, IIRC, were graphical, such as gparted, and were part of the 
installation.

|| FWIW, EMusic no longer allowed me to re-download all of my purchased 
|| music (they used to).

| Wow.  But on the other hand, it wasn't DRMed, if I remember correctly.
| What I really hate is a DRMed platform disappearing (eg. MS Plays For Sure

| -- what an inappropriate title!).

Emusic deals with mp3 formats, which as I understand it, is not DRM'ed. I
have copied selected mp3's to other media without incident.

| I always thought that an argument for the cloud was that they were 
| safer than leaving things in your own hands.

... all grist for a different thread ... But if I could find a link I would 
refer you to an online discussion about a fellow from a health care company 
who was in a panic because a "fail-safe" server "in the cloud" failed along 
with its backup server, placing some housebound patients under varying
degrees 
of critical care in jeopardy. In the thread, a question was asked by someone

who probably had no healthcare experience but sufficient tech savvy: "Whose 
crazy idea was it to trust 'cloud' servers with the handling of
life-critical 
health data?" This was followed by remark that would logically follow: "Fire

that person and start getting used to making house visits!"

<snip>

| Have you tried any of the advice?  To re-iterate:

I fully intend to try it out. I will be at a conference in Barrie most of 
this week, but I will see what I can do. I have some time between tonight
and 
Monday. I will let you know how it goes.

Paul King


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