Lyvim Xaphir wrote: >On Thu, 2002-03-28 at 07:26, Guy Zelck wrote: > >---snip--- > >>Interesting thread I thought to post my troubles with XFS to. >>When I installed md8.1 on my home system I went from reiserfs, which >>never gave me trouble, to using xfs which I knew from work having it on >>our Silicon Graphics machine. I also read a lot about it and for speed >>and features it seemed the best and having a high esteem for SGI I did >>not hesitate. >> >>Nevertheless I've experienced about 4 times so far the following (I have >>an IDE system disk 'quantum fireball' of 8GB): >>Every time there's a power cut I find a lot of files corrupted. Instead >>of their original contents they contain nothing but ^@ (viewed with vim) >>characters. The files concerned are e.g. all the KDE config files of >>apps that were open at the time of the power cut, but I once had inittab >>& message affected too. You can imagine that KDE wouldn't start after >>that in the 1st case and the whole system was fucked in the 2nd. This >>for me >> is totally unacceptable and I don't dare to imagine what this >>would mean for a company's production machine. >> > >Your results are interesting. But as in most other things it's >important to have a reference point(s) for comparison. So I've got some >questions: > >1) What is the history of this hardware with relation to the previously >installed scheme(s)? (what filesystem, Linux version, Win version) > The history is very recent since I bought this machine in Nov 2001 but lets start with my previous setup, this was : An AbitBX6 mb with a PII 266MHz, Intel BX440 chipset, 384 MB memory (100Mhz sdramm) and a completely SCSI setup based on the Adaptec AHA-2940 with Seagates of 512MB, 1GB & 2GB (3x) (old disks <=1995). My previous os was md7.2 and I used reiserfs for everything exept /boot (ext2). I suffered block ups and powerfails like every non ups'ed person but never had corruptions.
My present new machine is from Medion, sold by Aldi and has a 1.8GHz P4 on a msi mb (I'm not totally sure here, the manual is made for complete newbies and they avoid speaking about it alltogether), the chipset is Intel i845, there was 256MB (130MHz sdramm) memory on board by I added another 256MB, it has a Seagate st380020A (80GB) which has XP Home edition installed on it by Medion but I added a Quantum Fireball of 8GB for Linux (The 2 os'es are completely separated). The disks are on separate ide channels too with a dvd and cdrw as slave respectively. I use XFS for everything except /boot (ext2). I run md8.1 on it, stock kernel 2.4.8. I incorporated my complete SCSI chain from my previous machine to this new setup and use this as extra disk space for storage purposes and it still has my md7.2 on it as a backup. > > >2) Can you recall crashes under other circumstances that did not involve >XFS in any way? (under this hardware config) Focus a little on hard >drive history, as well as everything else. > I had a blockup which was os related one time and in that circumstance I had no corruption I think, but I was just lucky. But listen to the next: after having migrated my scsi chain I had one scsi disk that began to fall apart (from 1995 this one) and by doing so blocked my scsi bus which blocked the whole machine. I had to reboot and there I discovered to my horror and discomfort the corruptions for the 1st time. You can recognize the files as 'ASCII text, with no line terminators' with cmd 'file'. I had this 2 more times until this disk was 100% knock-out. I finally took it out and had no corruptions anymore. I more or less blamed reiserfs at 1st as I thought its interaction with the kernel blocked the working of xfs somehow but this makes no sense, even if xfs is blocked it should recover afterwards. Now, the 25 of March I suffered a plain power failure and bingo, the same corruptions appeared again. So now I'm sure it has nothing to do with my SCSI chain or reiserfs. > >3) What is the hardware's history with respect to diagnostics and >tests? Has the memory been checked, dos diagnostics run, cpu checked.. > Never ran any tests, have no experience with this, and since all my stuff is brand new... I never had any indication that sth. would be wrong with my cpu or memory. There is one thing I'm puzzled about and that is that my AHA-2940 scsi card's BIOS doesn't allow me to configure or diagnose my scsi disks anymore since it was moved to this new machine. PCI bus incompatibilities? But on bootup it still nicely recognizes all scsi disks and starts them one by one. In using the disks I have no problems as I use these scsi disk to do my downloads too. > > >If not, has the hardware got a respectable history of problem free >operation under the previous OS? yay or nay...plus some details would be >nice. > As you could read from the previous this hw dates only from Nov 2001 and I never had any abnormalities with this new h.w.. The troubles came from my legacy scsi hw I moved over but after the faulty scsi disk was singled out and removed I ran quite a long time problem free (from the beginning of this year). Thanks for taking serious intrest in this matter. I also thank Civileme for posting his experiences. Guy.
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