The funny thing about MOVs
MOVs, metal oxide varistors, are the standard mischief in most surge suppressers. The funny thing about them is that they silently wear out. They suck up a certain amount of surges, and they could then give up the ghost without a whimper.
That’s apparently what happened to me during the wind storm we had the other day. Reports indicate that we lost power around 11am Eastern, and we got everything back around 11pm, everything except my hard drive that is.
Just for the record, yes I have backups. No, they were not as current as I’d like, due to some wonky issues with my DVD burner. Maybe, I can recover most of the drive. My root partition mounted, but there were bad blocks on the /home partition. I’ve gotten a new hard drive and I’ve installed an OS (I wanted to try Ubuntu anyway). Once I get the DVD issues resolved I’ll work on the dead drive forensics.
In the meanwhile, my RSS aggravator is offline, and all the mischief I’ve added on to my browser is missing. I’m starting to see ads and pop-ups again and pages are loading slowly because I’m not blocking all your lame-ass free hit-counters.
Taxes are done. You’re damn right I had a frequently updated backup of that, although the IRS seems to have given everyone effected by those windstorms an extra two days or something.
The MOV un-funniness is something I always knew about, but never acted upon, but I’m wondering if maybe we all need to change out our power strips every year when we change our clocks or something. You would think that someone would come up with a power strip with a consumable, replaceable insert or something. Well, something to think about.
I suppose I’m going to post this screed, power down the box, pull the wall-plug and plan on power strip shopping tomorrow morning.
Leah Says :
I’m pretty sure there are surge protectors with swappable fuse-like parts. Is that the thing that absorbs the surges? I know I’ve seen them before.
During power outages, I unplug my computers. It’s easy since I just have my laptop. I think that my old laptop got fried on a bad connection (I plugged it straight into a crummy wall plug), as the power no longer works in it, so I am now extra cautious of where I chose to plug in my laptop.
2007-04-23 13:56 PermalinkStandard Mischief Says :
I was not home. It’s a desktop machine, and it runs 24/7.
Oddly enough, only the one disk seemed to suffer damage.
2007-04-25 22:57 Permalinkmini HOWTO: ReiserFS recovery suggestions (bad bread) at Standard Mischief Says :
[...] ReiserFS is a general-purpose, journaled computer file system that usually only shows up on *nix systems. A journaling file system basically records what it’s about to do in a journal before doing it, such that if power is lost during the operation, after it’s restored, the file system can recover itself. It’s suppose to be “fault tolerant”, but after a recent wind storm and the accompanying power outage, I found that one of the partitions on my hard drive would not mount. The root partition was kinda sorta flaky too, sometimes mounting, sometimes not. [...]
2007-05-13 23:44 Permalink