[vox-tech] In Denial About These Hard Drive Problems

[Rick Moen]

Quoting msimons@moria.simons-clan.com (msimons@moria.simons-clan.com):

>   I should provide more of an explanation... I am not saying all IBM
> drives are junk.  I do still recommend people with Deskstar 75GXP, 60GXP, 
> and 120GXP models find replacements and use them instead.

Just to clarify, I absolutely agreed with that recommendation.  I was
just saying that there have been lots of _other_ IBM Deskstar and
Ultrastar models, not members of those series, that have been just fine.

> As easy as Redhat and 2000 may be to load and configure...
>   If you consider either the time or the hassle trade-off,
>     of reinstalling and reconfiguring 
>       both operating systems and associated application suites, 
>     and later reloading the data files 
>      (those which were remembered at backup time)...
>   then I am certain that the method used was far superior.
> ;)

I can't speak to Win2k, having little relevant experience.  However
"reconfiguring" for the Linux side could be nothing more that migrating
and unpacking a tarball of /etc.

> Two points:
> - The filesystems were unstable: 
>   they were marked as unclean and e2fsck could not run over the partitions
>   due to bad blocks.  Mounting them could have been possible with -fr, but
>   ext3 tries to replay the journal even in readonly mode... and I didn't
>   want to risk more corruption.  I didn't try to fight it (*).
> - "cp" places more stress on the drive, and handles errors badly.

Yeah, good points.  I usually aim to get things off at the _first_ signs 
of drive trouble -- which from evidence cited would have been a lot earlier.

Doing a "dd" of the partition and piping it over ssh to another box
might have been useful.

>   When I arrived at the machine it was booting into Linux and a prior 
> unsuccessful shutdown had flagged the unclean bit on the root filesystem.
> The e2fsck failed due to bad blocks... and it dumped us into the 'root 
> password: please, repair the filesystem prompt".  The root filesystem had 
> been mounted in read-only mode...

Really bad juju.  I think I'd have called in an exorcist.