[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

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


Follow-Ups: References: