Re: Huge unreliability - does Linux have something to do with it?
From: Jim Nelson (james4765_at_cwazy.co.uk)
Date: 02/04/05
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Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2005 05:31:42 -0500 To: jerome lacoste <jerome.lacoste@gmail.com>
jerome lacoste wrote:
> [Sorry for the sensational title]
>
> I have had this laptop for three years. It ran Linux (Debian unstable)
> from the start and its hardware has been very unreliable: I changed
> hard disks twice and the motherboard thrice. My DVD drive started
> failing some days ago (this one is 'original', 3 years old). But I
> don't mind as I am not under warranty anymore... This morning the
> machine booted with fsck errors on my hard disk. I am not sure if I
> did the right thing, but I said clear the inodes, and I ended up
> loosing some programs(*) (du, dircolors, etc..). The day starts well
> isn't it? Sounds like I will have to switch disks again...
>
> I halted the machine correctly yesterday night. I never dropped the
> box in 3 years. Am I just being unlucky? Or could the fact that I am
> using Linux on the box affect the reliability in some ways on that
> particular hardware (Dell Inspiron 8100)? I run Linux on 3 other
> computers and never had single problems with them.
>
> How can the file system (ext3) be messed up the way it was this
> morning after I stopped the machine correctly yesterday?
> Could a hardware failure look like bad sectors to fsck?
>
It can. I had a drive crash on my server a couple of months ago, and I had ext3
errors show up before the syslog filled up with the ide errors. The hard disk was
only 1 1/2 years old.
If the bad sectors happen where directory inodes are written, your directory
structure will be turned into swiss cheese. That will *definitely* cause ext3
errors, and dump you (in Red Hat systems, at least) to a shell on reboot.
> Attached the output of smartctl -a /dev/hda, whatever that helps.
>
> Jerome
>
> (*) I accept tips on discovering and maybe recovering which files have
> been taken out of my system...
>
You might not have any luck. After fsck -f, I thought I had saved the drive,
copied everything that was left onto another machine, and found that most of the
larger files had holes in them - mp3's had skips, jpegs were completely corrupted,
etc.
That's what made me get a backup FireWire drive... :)
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- Previous message: Terje Fåberg: "Re: 2.6.10: kswapd spins like crazy"
- In reply to: jerome lacoste: "Huge unreliability - does Linux have something to do with it?"
- Next in thread: Bernd Eckenfels: "Re: Huge unreliability - does Linux have something to do with it?"
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