Guy Zelck wrote: > 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. > > > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? >Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com > Yep, thanks for asking, Lyvim, and for answering, Guy.
NEW is something that should always be checked. Infant mortality in electronic devices is common and failures are rare from infancy on to about 5 years or so... KInd of an interesting switch on the usual Poisson distribution, but nevertheless true. memtest-x86.bin is on your CD1 in the images directory and can be sent to floppy with a dd and the floppy can be booted and run to test memory. An initial 512 Mb may not show problems for quite a while, even running linux. I had the unpleasant experience of negotiating a warranty return on a 512M DDR recently, and my system would run for days then suddenly reset without any indication in the logs of any temperature conditions.... Civileme
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
