Ralph Shumaker wrote:
My friend's PC insisted on root password for maintenance when booting up
(or press a key to continue). Fortunately, my friend sometimes pays
attention to warnings.
I supplied root password.
mount worked.
df did not.
man fsck did not work.
fsck did not give me a list of options. It just took off running.
I manually hit Enter (to answer "yes") to a *lot* of things. It only
found problems on the partition containing /usr (which is one slice of
the only HDD in the system). There are several directories and *many*
files now in /usr/lost+found.
gnome won't load, tho kde seems ok. Firefox won't launch because it
can't find the executable. Thunderbird takes a long time before
silently giving up. yum remove firefox won't remove it.
I'm trying to remember any other problems, but that covers most of it.
I'm going back there sometime tomorrow. Is the HDD unreliable?
Fortunately, she doesn't care about much of the data.
As I've said before, I've gone down this road before, because of
basically the exact same symptoms - only to find that the actual problem
was not the HDD, but a faulty motherboard (failed to read RAM properly)
or RAM. I learned my lesson by further corrupting the HDD through having
fsck "fix" or delete perfectly good data.
It's seldom wise to jump to conclusions based on a few ambiguous
symptoms, and risk trashing your data without first doing some
fundamental diagnostics. Bad RAM, Power Supplies, and even keyboards
(rare now I think) can also cause drive errors.
The first component to be tested should *always* be the RAM. People tend
to bypass that step simply because it takes so long to run a thorough
test (with memtest386 or friends) and they're impatient to get things
working again. If RAM fails, don't assume it's bad. Test it in another
box. If RAM passes, then move on to other components. If you get to the
point you're certain it's the HDD, then test it in another box (with a
real drive diagnostics program) just to make sure.
Remember, lots of things must work correctly and in unison before that
data gets read from, or written to, the drive. It only takes one bad bit
to corrupt data. That corruption can occur anywhere. With most of the
guts of the computer now residing in just a few monolithic modules
welded to the motherboard, it's getting harder and harder to pin down
the source.
Or take the "Shoot first and call anything you hit the target" path.
Your data, your choice.
She uses it mainly for internet and printing. And it is running
noticeably slower with fc7 than it was with fc4. I think (like mine) it
is hitting swap. What are the names of the window managers that take
very little overhead?
It seems 1 Gig of RAM is now the minimum which makes Fedora with a GUI
really happy. Fortunately, RAM is a cheap drug.
I played with some other window managers on some rather old and anemic
laptops, and while they were lighter weight in terms of complexity,
flexibility, configurability, and eye-candy, a seat-of-the-pants measure
of performance found them so little better than KDE or Gnome there was
really no point using them other than aesthetics.
I'm probably going to get a newer PC for myself. But she doesn't care
about the PC much beyond surfing the internet and probably won't want to
spend the money. She probably won't hesitate to spend it if I make the
case for it. But for her needs, just reducing the overhead will
probably suffice.
Note that Fedora 7 now installs and sets the Beagle desktop search
engine to run at startup. It can really soak bandwidth on a marginal
system. You can also get a significant performance boost by knocking
down video color depth to 16 bits. Unless you're doing serious graphics
or 3D gaming, your eyes won't notice.
--
Best Regards,
~DJA.
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