Disk copies and kernel paging request failures

[Al Youngwerth <alberty@apexxtech.com>]

I modified a little public domain dos program that will do a sector for sector copy of one hard drive to up to three other hard drives. Its very handy for quickly duplicating a linux configuration onto other disks of the same type.

I've noticed one problem however, When I first start up some of these new disks, I tend to get a rash of "Unable to handle kernel paging request" errors (2 to 4 of them) in the first day of operation and then they seem to go away. I believe they may be disk related because I see the problem happen with different programs and I seem to have plenty of swap space available when it happens (I've seen it happen with top running and I was using about 1.5MB of swap out of 32MB available).

I'm adding a checksum verify to the program this morning and I'm going to start forcing fsck on newly copied disks.

Does anyone have any other suggestions? Should I be doing a mkswap -C after the copy (to force a check for bad blocks)? Is there a fsck for swap?

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks,

Al Youngwerth
alberty@apexxtech.com

P.S. if anyone is interested in the disk copy progam, I can send you a copy.


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