Cron and dying disk
Someone earlier mentioned a cron job being run at 7:00 AM, complaining
about the heavy CPU/memory usage. I've found another complication.
I had one new hard disk die just after installation. I was in the
process of transferring my Slackware Linux filesystem over to it when
the superblock became unreadable. The university here replaced it,
and I took the opportunity of the Debian release to switch to the
Debian 1.3 distribution.
It seems that someone got ahold of a batch of bad disks, because every
morning I come in and the cron job has failed and left my root file
system unmounted. On reboot, I find that I have to run fsck manually
to correct a faulty filesystem -- I see error messages similar to those
which preceeded the death of the previous disk.
Does anyone have any suggestions on disk maintance, and how to keep a
flawed disk up? Is this truely a hardware problem?
I understand that new hard disks have some measurable frequency of
flaws, but two consecutive disks suggests a very high rate of failure.
The only other Linux user in my department apparently also had a disk
die (RedHat user -- we've covered the major distributions pretty well),
and I would also like to know if there could be some problem with the
the combination of a particular hard disk (or its configuration) and
Linux.
The university here has no support for Linux users, so they are
only confused when I try to explain that I don't run their installed
Win95/DOG system on the hardware they provided me.
David
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