Re: Serious problem with Linux on an old PC

On Tue, 29 Aug 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.setup, in article
<1156859110.26341.0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Bernard wrote:

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Bernard wrote:

'/dev/hda5 contains a filesystem with errors ! check forced...

Essentially it looks like the disk is falling apart.

Get a new disk, and reinstall on that.

Yes, but then, why did this happen last june on /dev/hdc3 and now in
/dev/hda5 ? These are two different disks (my PC has 3, the third one
being hdb). It seems curious that, after 8 years of good service, both
disks would give up at the same time or just about... I have heard of PC
lasting 15 years or more...

Mmm. We generally found SCSI disks gave up about 5 years in..

That's nice. Assuming I keep the drives at a reasonable case temperature,
I haven't had that many disk failures. The primary disk on this
workstation is a WD from 1996, and has been running virtually continuously
since new. The drive on the 386SX firewall at home is a Maxtor 213 Meg that
is nearly 19 years old.

But don't discount the possibility that something - dust, temperature,
or even a power failure - has damaged both at the same point.

However another possibility - that of a failing SCSI controller - exists..

How would a failing SCSI controller effect IDE disks?

The answer there is to borrow someone else's SCSI machine and try and
mount and fsck the drives on that.

How did you get onto SCSI, when the system having problems is using IDE?
Is that a "whoosh" bird I hear? Since the mid-90s, the IDE controller
(such as it is) has been part of the South-Bridge of the motherboard
chip set. If that's having problems, it's a "chuck the motherboard into
the trash" time.

Old guy
.

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