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Re: My machine going crazy
Regarding your machine getting more and more unstable.
It sounds to me like either a serious hardware problem (maybe ide
controller or disk drive), or a badly trashed ext2fs file system, or
maybe a disk geometry problem.
I once had a system which crashed and every time I ran ext2fsck it got
worse - more files being yanked, etc. Finally I reformatted the hard
disk and reinstalled and things were fine.
You said that the 2nd drive is a 1.2gb drive, and has the linux
partition as the first partition, with a size of 300mb. What does
Linux's fdisk say about it? Since you have an old bios, I assume it
doesn't do any geometry translation hacks to deal with large disks.
Maybe the partition is specified in the wrong geometry and your 1st
and 2nd partitions overlap.
What I'd do is:
1. boot via a rescue disk, and check the partition data for
/dev/hdb. Compare it to the partition data that dos's fdisk
reports. If there are differences, I'd wipe the disk and
reinstall from scratch. If it's the same, I'd go to step 2.
2. After booting via a rescue disk, keep running forced fscks until
fsck comes up completely clean afew times. Then, if there's
still enough left to still boot, I'd try booting from the hard
disk again, and see how things work. If a sizable chunk of the
the file system has gone bye-bye, I'd reformat and install from
scratch.
3. Once linux is up and running again, do massive i/o tests on the
hard disk, and keep checking for problems (check the kernel
message files, etc). Maybe do finds across the hard disk, as
well as running iozone, copying the disk to /dev/null, kernel
compilations, and whatever else you can think of to get lots of
reading and writing (including creating and deleting lots of new
files). Make sure to seriously stress test everything to see if
your hardware is ok. Also, go back and forth btw Linux and DOS
to make sure that it's not dos which is running amok and
trashing the end of your Linux partition.
Good luck,
--
Dr. Harvey J. Stein
Berger Financial Research
abel@netvision.net.il
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