[ltp] Is my T23 thinkpad hard drive failing?

[Christopher Sawtell]

On Tue, 31 May 2005 08:05, Cheryl Homiak wrote:
> Well, it may be something on my gentoo system--not sure whether that
> makes me feel better or worse. I forced a check on reboot with tune2fs
> but after that theproblem seemed even worse; I could hardly do anything
> without messages about the ext3 journal aborting or I/O error or both.
> So I stuck in my Knoppix cd and rebooted and ran e2fsck on the relevant
> devices with knoppix running. Rebooted to my system and haven't had an
> error or grinding noise yet. Of course it's only been fifteen minutes
> but the noise and errors were coming pretty much as soon as I tried to
> do something before. So if this continues and i don't track down the
> problem, I could be looking at a reinstall. Either way, I may consider
> getting a new hard drive; whatever the problem is I seem to have averted
> immediate disaster.
>
> Thanks for the tip about the maintenance guide!!!

Your problems sound very similar to my situation.

A few points:-
1) Cpu fans make an appalling low frequency growling noise when the bearings
   fail. On the other hand isks emit a high pitched squeal when death is
   imminent. 
2) Make sure you are running one of the power saver daemons, because it will
   not only save power but also keep the temperature down. I have
   cpufreq_ondemand loaded as a kernel module
3) Make sure you have this line:-
	Option      "DynamicClocks" "on"        # [<bool>]
in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. It similarly reduces temperature of the 
Graphics system chip.
4) The ibm_acpi extentions are useful too. You can emerge them. There is a fan 
module.

--
C. S.