Re: [debian-knoppix] hd corruption
Hi,
On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 08:57:02PM +0000, North London John wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have installed Knoppix 20/1/2003 twice on my hd - and both times,
> after a couple of days, the hd partitions have become corrupted, and
> knoppix has refused to boot.
Did you enable DMA for the harddisks after installation? KNoppix uses
DMA for harddisks when running from CD, but not for CD-Roms, because
there are some problems, namely with VIA controllers concerning DMA.
Harddisk corruption can have several reasons:
1.) The aforementioned DMA problem (only with certain controllers, and
you usually see a lot of errors with "dmesg"). But after HD
installation, DMA support is no longer turned on by default.
2.) Defective RAM (which is more common than you may think, and the
errors are not even detected until a file or swap is read again). If you copy a
big file, and the md5sum checksums of those two files differ, you may
have defective or overclocked RAM.
3.) Harddisk errors (hardware), or cable problems, or simply wrong BIOS
settings for the transfer modes.
> The second time, I think my win98 partition was also corrupted - not
> fatally, but an unusually large amount of mb was being used.
>
> I am not sure whether this is a hardware problem - scandisk doesn't
> report any problems,
scandisk neither detects defective RAM, nor hardware errors. It is a
basically useless program, and can only repair windows filesystem soft
errors.
> Knoppix from cd identified everything correctly,
> but I've had a very difficult time trying to install Linux, and Knoppix
> was the first to actually work. (Red Hat 8 and Mandrake 9 seemed to
> install, but both stalled on booting, after the message
> Freeing unused kernal memory
> {Mandrake:] 136k freed
> [Red hat: 212kb freed]
This is normal, depends on what is compiled into the kernel.
> I'm using an AJP (generic) laptop, from circa 1999, 10gb hd, 128k ram,
> Celeron 500mhz.
Looks OK to me. Have you ever had a RAM upgrade that could explain a
memory error?
> The question in a nutshell: has anyone had similar problems with hd
> corruption?
Only with hardware errors, to the best of my knowledge.
> If it is a bug, it is pretty serious - but is it likely to be one?
It is very likely a hardware bug, either wrong BIOS settings or physical
errors on the harddisk, or wrong RAM settings/chipsets. I know the
latter error from an Athloin XP that I bought, the error would have been
impossible to fund under Windows, even a memtest86 reported no error,
but the file copy and checksumming showed clearly that the RAM did not
fit the board.
> As I say, I can't rule out a hardware problem.
Please try the file copy and md5sum method, with files that are larger
than your available RAM.
Regards
-Klaus Knopper
--
Klaus Knopper Technical Solutions & Finances
knopper@linuxtag.org http://www.linuxtag.org/
Phone +49-(0)631-3109371 Fax +49-(0)631-3109372
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