I thought that I was going through that with another one as well.  The hard drive in Frankenputer seemed to have gone on me after another update of Hardy Heron.  I had split the drive up into three partitions, one as the root partition “/”, swap, and a third one as “/home”.  The root partition was formatted as EXT3 and the /home was partitioned as ReiserFS.  After yet another update (development software after all), I rebooted into a corrupted first partition and E2FSCK didn’t help, dropping me to a single user recovery shell.  I ran FSCK manually and was able to get the partition reorganized.  I carried on but this was not the end of my troubles.

One more update killed it for good, I thought.  My drive was not even recognized on boot.  Its the second hard drive and I actually have GRUB, my bootloader on the first drive.  I’ve been letting whichever operating system that does the latest update handle GRUB, which meant that the config file with the instructions for GRUB “/boot/grub/menu.list”, was on the second drive on the corrupted partition.  no problem, I just popped in a Linux install CD (Ubuntu of some version, I recall), and chose the option to boot from the first hard drive to get into Arch Linux o that I could do some online digging about this problem.

Somehow, the corruption of the first partition seemed to have affected the boot sector of the second drive as well, which was causing the problem with the BIOS picking up the drive.  I was able to “see” and mount the “/home” partition, so I figured that the drive just couldn’t be dead, as I had thought.  I immediately attempted to back up as much data as I could access onto DVD, which was quite successful, albeit a tad slow, as the OS and the DVD burner were on the same IDE cable.  On a lark, I reformatted the first partition with ReiserFS, which in my opinion, has a far superior recovery on unexpected shutdown.  Suddenly, the whole drive was once again visible to the BIOS.

I reinstalled Gutsy Gibbon and used my existing “/home” and restored my user and each of the kids.  The only difference was that a few programs were missing, which  can be recovered, and some theme-related files which were in “/usr/share” were not available.

So, the take away from this story is that your hard drive may not actually be bad.  It might just be that your hardware is not perfectly suited to go together and a file system corruption may be the cause of your troubles.

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Double Check that Hard Drive before you Toss It

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What’s Up With Reiser?

If I hadn’t tried Reiserfs (at version 2.9 or 3.0) and saw how much faster my desktop worked with this “unstable” filesystem keeping the pidgeons in their holes, I may not have paid much attention to the whole sensational drama surrounding this true Linux geek.  So, where is Nina Reiser? Hubby’s in jail, arraigned on murder for a body that can’t be found.  I think that she’s in Russia and he’s going to rot for nothing.

So, what does this mean for Reiser4? Is there going to be a Reiser4? Are the traditional supporters going to return? Suse? Hello? Of all the filesystems I have tried on the same kernel of Linux, Reiser had the best speed (especially v4), followed by EXT3 and then XFS/JFS.  Microsoft’s filesystems didn’t keep up at all, running at the same speed as EXT2.

Surely, something good will come of this whole mess.

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Thoughts on Reiser and Hans

I have had two hard drives.  One is was an 80 Gig Maxtor Diamond Max 9.  Hopefully, it will last for a long time.  The other is was a 16 Gig Seagate U-series drive that I bought for $5.

The large drive houses my main distro, Ubuntu (currently Hardy Heron, somewhere around Alpha 4-5) and the smaller one houses whatever I want to play with.  Right now, its got Arch, running e17.

Neither is true any more. Both drives failed. The 80G Maxtor is still in my machine, but the IDE power cable has been pulled form it. I backed it up to a new Western Digital WD1600JS, which is a 160GB SATA II drive (jumpered to SATA to work on my old motherboard), housing Ubuntu 9.10 on the first partitions (“/” on 1, swap, and “/home” on a separate partition). It also currently has a very broken 9.10 to 10.04 upgrade on another partition (which I am keeping on to see if it will ever update itself past the kernel panic it gets with the latest kernel – and no desktop GUI will load, thanks to Ubuntu breaking everything, as usual). As well, there is Mepis 8.5 alpha and Fedora 12 LXDE respin.

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My Distros