On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 08:11:53PM +1300, cr wrote: > On Tue, 07 Oct 2003 07:04, Pigeon wrote: > > On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 05:09:29AM +1300, cr wrote: > > > I've only had one sieze in recent times, what I've had several of > > > recently is sudden complete power cut - possibly a power supply fault. > > > Either way, it has the same effect of discombobulating my hard drive so I > > > have to do a lot of fscking on startup again. Occasionally this > > > completely munges my X setup. > > > > I think you might find ext3 to be a big help, though it's not a > > complete solution - if the power dies in the middle of a write, you > > can end up with a bad sector being created, which can confuse things a > > bit. > > Are there any downsides to ext3? If you have a filesystem with a dirty journal you MUST try and replay the journal, ie, fsck it, before doing anything else with it. If you forget this you'll probably end up with worse damage than if you made the same mistake with ext2. ext3 can be mounted as ext2 in emergency, eg. if your rescue kernel hasn't got ext3 support, but don't be tempted to mount it read-write. There's also a slight speed hit. This will be the case with any journalled filesystem as there is more writing involved. I'm a fan of SCSI hard drives, and I like to set up ext3 with an external journal, ie. on a different physical drive, which speeds things up a bit, though at the cost of making your data twice as vulnerable to hard drive failures (if the journal drive dies you're likely to end up with an unfsckable mess on the data drive). ext3 vs. reiser is a bit like emacs vs. vi. I haven't tried reiser, so I won't comment on it. > The new PSU idea will get tried out next weekend when I can pick one up. > (It's cheaper than the other possibility which is trying out a new > motherboard + CPU :) It's worth noting that O(500MHz) PII/III machines are dumpster items nowadays, but are still capable enough to be useful for trying that sort of test before committing yourself. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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