Unfortunately I spent most of the day trying to install a new external 500GB harddisk on my Linux home server. After I bought it and plugged it in, all went well. However, when I started copying over all the files from my old hard disk (which is going to move to my father), I suddenly got I/O errors…
Turns out the disks (presumably) got a bit too hot. I stacked them on top of eachother, in a small space, which apparently isn’t such a good idea, especially when you’re going to copy almost 250 GB of files.
So I spent most of the day and evening trying to fix them. I managed to fix the new disk by reformatting and repartitioning a few times, with different programs (fdisk, cfdisk, even PartitionMagic on Windows), but I couldn’t do this with the old one since it had data.
Finally I found a solution, which is to plug the old disk to a Windows PC (which for some reason can still read it), and move all the files to the server from there. A long, painful process, which is running now and will probably take the rest of the night.
Long story short: Don’t stack harddisks in a small space, they don’t like that!