Catastrophic disk failure, where was smartd?

[David G. Mackay]

On Mon, 2008-03-31 at 16:11 -0700, Leslie Satenstein wrote:
> I would say that the hard disk did not have time to shout help to the
> system bios.

It looks like it was the drive's electronics that failed, so yes, it'd
be pretty sudden.

> No Help, I am sick and dying, Make a backup of me before I go..

Fortunately, it was backed up.

> On a more serious note, is there a way to fake a hard disk failure
> that smartd code would react to?

You could take a virtualized disk drive/controller and program just
about anything that you wanted into it.

Dave