On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, John Lumby wrote:
> Thanks to both of you who replied. Very helpful ineed.
>
> I can confirm that 1.7.361 is able to mount an ext3 filesystem that is
> clean. I have one question on this - is it safe to mount it rw? I
> tried it (on a not-very-precious fs) and it appeared ok but mount said
> it was ext2. I suppose it is "at your own risk". Anyway, ro is all
> I need for the particular filesystem I am trying to recover. I didn't
> try the debugfs/tune2fs/e2fsck ideas. I was lucky that I was able to
> run a complete cycle of boot, fsck-st-start, shutdown on the dodgy disk.
If the filesystem is clean it is perfectly safe to switch between ext2
and ext3 as much as you like. At that time the only physical difference is
the existance of the file on the journal inode. Even e2fsck is identical.
> > > The problem is there are a lot of auto-detects happening here, any one
> > > of them could be upsetting some piece of hardware and most of them say
> > > nothing if they find nothing.
> >
> As I mentioned in my original note:
> > The old 1.7.361 gets past that point and (with a slight difference in
> that
> > it prints only a single line for the hda) continues on with messages
> about:
> > scsi: 0 hosts
> > scsi: detected xxx
>
> Can you confirm (or tell me how to confirm) that the kernel in 2.0.103
> auto-detects devices in the same order as the one in 1.7.361? Which
> would then imply that the problem is definitely with the scsi
> detection. I am roughly thinking along the lines of -
> . unpack.s
> . replace the scsi piece of the kernel with the equivalent piece from
> the thinkpad's own kernel (I did say "roughly")
> . buildit.s
The SCSI 'super driver' is a lot more verbose than others, there are so
many drivers that say absolutly nothing that that means nothing.
The ppa driver is the next to display a message after your hang, it's
those parallel port 'ZipDrive' things. It's treated as an odd SCSI
device by Linux (It actually is one with a parallel->SCSI converter!)
Your best bet would be to download the kernel.config from Toms website
get the kernel source and toms patches. You then compile your own kernel
by minimising the drivers that are compiled directly into the kernel:
NO ethernet drivers -- make the one the thinkpad uses a module.
NO SCSI, turn the entire SCSI subsystem into modules.
Remove anything else that isn't needed right now.
-- I think this includes the floppy for 2.0.103, 'cause the
ramdisk is loaded by lilo.
You may also have to dump some of the other modules because this
will make the total size slightly larger. Also make sure all the
modules you let tomsrtbt autoload are PCI, these use a common, safe,
detection routine.
--
Rob. (Robert de Bath <robert$ @ debath.co.uk>)
<http://www.cix.co.uk/~mayday>
Google Homepage: http://www.google.com/search?btnI&q=Robert+de+Bath
