[PLUG] IDE oddities

Eric Wilhelm scratchcomputing at gmail.com
Sat Apr 1 08:52:21 UTC 2006


Anybody seen this sort of thing before?

  dd if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/randfile bs=1024k count=5
  md5sum /tmp/randfile > /var/tmp/p1
  umount /tmp
  mount /tmp
  md5sum /tmp/randfile > /var/tmp/p2
  cat /var/tmp/p?

   e602832f95ef1f395c3dc98a4428b35a  /tmp/randfile
   0ba83cd02d0e182db2a551891a9ecaa9  /tmp/randfile

I can't quite figure out why some files change in subtle ways after 
remounting the drive.  At this point, I'm blaming the motherboard, 
power supply, or some other subtle issue.

I started in the installed OS with the drive on a promise pci card, got 
the same results with the on-board IDE, and again with a rescue CD, 
plus all of those scenarios with a different disk in the same box.  
Both drives work fine in a usb enclosure hung on a different machine.

What I can't figure out is why the other (root) drive gave me no trouble 
(though I didn't test that with the remounting, etc. and it's been up 
for the ~150 days since I installed it -- so maybe that drive didn't 
get unmounted enough times to suffer the bitrot?)

This is an old (200MHz NEC) box that's been through quite a lot.  I 
suppose it is time to hang it up and get something slightly younger and 
blonder from freegeek.

--Eric
-- 
"It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so 
ingenious."
--Murphy's Second Corollary
---------------------------------------------------
    http://scratchcomputing.com
---------------------------------------------------



More information about the PLUG mailing list