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Re: My machine going crazy



Thanks Harvey

Your answer seems to be exactly what happened here. I checked again in 
the BIOS definitions and with the printing output of the partitions table 
I have (At least I have that...). I was stupid enough not to see it 
before - the disk in the BIOS defined with 2484 Cyl while fdisk takes it 
as 621 Cyl. A very big mistake of me. As you said - and I guess you are 
right - after a period of working with those partitions they started to 
get full and flowded to the other partitions. Thus the situation getting 
crazy and crazy... 

But - I have the luck to buy a new machine yesterday. I'm going to copy 
the important files from this ill partitions to the new Linux machine (I 
hope I'll not have other stupid mistake there :-) I'll do that, as you 
said, with the rescue disskette and with ro mounting, So I guess I'll be 
able to save most of the files. 

Anyway thanks a lot for explain me that - I have back the confidance in 
the stability of Linux (If no stupid mistake are made ;-)

Also thanks for all of the people who tried to understand what's going on 
in my box. (As I saw later Eli also suggested a disk geometry problem. 
Thanks).


Rani.


On Sun, 2 Jun 1996, Harvey J. Stein wrote:

> 
> 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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Rani Pinchuk <pinchuk@kinetica.com>    Kinetica Internetting Solutions LTD.
Tel: 972-3-6418130
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