It seems that the disk that was failing in my main desktop PC was actually the 250Gb boot drive, although I still think the 1Tb data drive is iffy as its still giving me SMART messages. Not heard a useful response from eBuyer about the other 1Tb drive being replaced…..

Anyway I managed to clone the disk to another identical 250Gb WD2500AAKS I had doing nothing in my backup PC; and am now back up and running. Luckily the disk managed to stay online for the hour or so cloning process, as that is the problem with this drive – it keeps turning itself off, so its a power failure issue not a sector problem (so no SMART errors).

The replacement drive is just as old though, so I think when/if I get a 1Tb drive replaced and Fedora 12 is out, I’ll just have the one drive for boot and data in my main PC, as its not worth buying a new 250Gb boot drive for 30-odd quid when for 50-odd you can get a 1Tb drive! 1.5Tb are still a bit pricey, unless you want a slow 5400rpm one (fine for fileserver, but not for boot/virtualisation).

I just watched Harry Potter 6, well this series is seriously dragging on now, obviously this isn’t the last in the series (2 more to come out of book 7?) but at 2.5 hours+ per movie, it really isn’t getting anywhere!

Doghouse was much better, a kind of cross between Shaun Of The Dead and Dog Soldiers (both excellent comedy horrors); with a lads night out in the country turning into a zombie flick!

Update: I’ve also been playing around with demuxing and remuxing video files – basically you have a video with broken AC3 audio and you want to extract the audio, convert to MP3, delete the original audio from the video, then put the new audio back into the video:

tcextract -i broken.avi -x a52 > onlysound.a52
ffmpeg -i onlysound.a52 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 320k -ac 2 -vol 1000 sound.mp3
ffmpeg -i broken.avi -an -vcodec copy onlyvideo.avi
ffmpeg -i onlyvideo.avi -vcodec copy -i onlysound.mp3 -ab 320k -ac 2 fixed.avi -newaudio