Re: fsck hangs my machine unpredictably

["Daniel B." <dsb@smart.net>]

"Monique Y. Herman" wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 09 Oct 2003 at 19:15 GMT, Rob Dupuis penned:
> > Hi All.
> >
> > My one of my hard drives has a whole load of errors on it. 
...> 
> Um, you do realize that if the hard drive is causing fsck to blow
> chunks, it's because the hard drive is defective and needs to be
> replaced, right?

Actually not.  There is no implication that the disk driver is going
bad, just that the data on the disk really corrupted.

The Linux kernel has had and still has a number bugs that can corrupt
the filesystem data on an IDE disk, especially when using DMA.

**Rob:  If you are using IDE disks (if you don't know that you have
SCSI disks, you most surely have IDE disks), you should immediately
disable DMA.  

(E.g., add "ide=nodma" to your kernel command line.  Where you can set 
your kernel command line depends on how you boot.)


Daniel
-- 
Daniel Barclay
dsb@smart.net