False alarm

I woke up to find that my computer was off due to a power outage. When it turned on, there was a buzzing noise that I thought was from the hard drive, but I realized just now that it must have been from the DVD drive (which apparently no longer works, but still checks itself at bootup).

Then, after selecting the main hard drive to boot up, the screen was completely black. I tried pressing buttons, and eventually managed to get a blinking "_" cursor, and then the fsck utility's output about cleared inodes and a forced filesystem check, and I thought the delay was also indicative of a problem.

Eventually (after 10+ minutes), I came back just as it was ending and saw the message that fsck had exited with status code 1, which I was sure was very bad and that my hard drive was about to die, if I could even finish booting up at all.

But it turns out that this exit code means, "Filesystem errors corrected", which could have been the normal result of powering off suddenly.

So, after several tense minutes of backing up files that had not been backed up since as long as five months ago (browser bookmarks), I now believe that my system is completely normal. The sounds that I had thought were my hard drive being conspicuously louder than normal are, I now believe, completely normal. The SMART data shows no abnormalities, showing 1 Current Pending Sector and 1 Uncorrectable Sector, in a file I identified ~11 years ago, and the Power-On Hours still stuck at the maximum of 9 years, 11 months, and 27 days, as it has been for years.

I have a contingency plan, in the form of an SSD purchased with the very last of my Coronavirus money, but I don't think I would have used it if my computer had failed to boot up today. There is nothing I urgently need to say or do, and if I used this contingency plan, I would need to make a decision of whether to copy the photo of Kate that has been sitting on my desktop for the past 13 years over to my new OS installation. I don't think a reasonable person would say that it helps her for me to keep thinking of her after all this time.