weird disk related panic

[James Frazer]

> Although this is a laptop, I experienced such issues on desktop machines
> when there was low voltage due to broken 230V circuit in the building,
> and the hard drives turned off and tried to come back up, of course no
> OS tolerates this. Can't you hear strange noises (clicks) before the
> panics?


It always seems to panic when I'm not around.  The only time I've
caught it doing anything odd was the time that parts of the FS became
invisible (oddly enough it didn't lead to a panic that time).  It was
making noise then, albeit no different from it's regular noises (it has
always been a very verbal drive) -- and that time I think there was some
kind of scheduled find operation that was running in the background
creating a flurry of disk activity.

I don't know how it has survived days of compiling stuff nonstop,  yet, now
it wants to go funny when left idle -- and I even made sure the BIOS
settings set so that the drive never shuts down or goes to
sleep.