My Linux box is finally starting to have problems due to bad sectors on the drive with the root file system.
It seems to mostly work still. There are various ways to make it better, from most to least lazy:
1. Run badblocks so the bad sectors won't be used anymore. Files still corrupted and it could get worse.
2. Copy partition to a new drive. Files still corrupted but it won't get worse.
3. Do a new installation on a new drive. No corruption but will take a while to get things set up again.
@hyrulian Install the same OS and copy all of your dotfiles over? I did this for years and I could even open firefox back up and restore all of my tabs/logins
@realtime Same OS might be a little tricky—it is Ubuntu 8.04, which has been out of support for several years. I think the official repositories don’t have the files anymore and I would have to find a mirror that still has them.
Also, it’s been used more as a server, with an IRC bot, FTP server, and Web server (no longer used). I’m thinking it might be tricky to get the IRC bot, with all the customizations someone else has done to it, working on an up-to-date release.
@hyrulian Update your Sources.list to have
https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/
Instead of archive.ubuntu.org
Done. All repos are still there, you just gotta modify your sources manually :)
@yestergearpc Thanks for the tip!