Last update on the hard disk problem (I hope)

Ok, hopefully last but hopefully not least:

• I took the disk that was failing (call it “A”) and the disk that normally lives in a USB external drive case (call it “B”) and put them in my Windows box and booted with Knoppix, and copied all the files over.
• I put “B” into my Linux server, and it’s working perfectly. Unfortunately a few hundred songs on my mp3 collection are stuck in /mp3s/lost+found because of various Reiserfs problems along the way.
• I put “A” into the external USB drive case, and IT WORKS PERFECTLY.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to read the ID3 equivalent information on AAC (m4a) files, so I can restore all the files in /mp3s/lost+found to where they belong.

I’ve extended an offer to Alan Cox to ship my “A” drive to a kernel developer if any of them want to see what’s going wrong there, since as I’ve said before the drive passed WDC’s diagnostics, works fine in the 2.4 kernel, and fails in the 2.6 kernel no matter which machine, cable, motherboard chipset or IDE controller I try it on. He hasn’t responded yet.