[PLUG] Bad-mouthing ext3

[William A Morita]

John,

What self respecting Linux user would not have a Knoppix or live Ubuntu copy
handy to recover a file to a memory stick?
At the very least, it would have shown you the issue with the hard drive
immediately. 

- Bill Morita

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org
[mailto:plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org] On Behalf Of John Jason Jordan
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 8:02 PM
To: PLUG
Subject: [PLUG] Bad-mouthing ext3

Several times I have complained here about ext3. It turns out that I may owe
ext3 an apology. 

The other day I was at PSU and my computer would not boot. The Compaq splash
screen came up, then nothing. Of course, this happened when I had a
presentation due in four hours and the Impress file was on the computer. And
I have to run it from the computer through the AV stuff in the classroom
because if I try to run an OOo file from my H drive it would not likely
work. I doubt that the university has OOo available on the computers in the
classroom, let alone the IPA fonts I needed or the sound clips I had links
to in the Impress file.

The help desk in the basement of Smith could not help, but suggested that
the CAT people in the CompSci building could probably assist a Linux user.
On the way to the CompSci building it dawned on me that if Grub was not
coming up, this must be a symptom that the hard drive was not found. You'd
think the BIOS would have the common sense to explain this to me instead of
just hanging, but we're talking cheap HP hardware here.

When I got to the CompSci building the first thing I asked for was a small
phillips head screwdriver so I could reseat the drive. Believe it or not, in
the entire place no one could come up with a small phillips head
screwdriver. 

Back to the basement of Smith, the help desk people ushered me into the back
room where students were busy putting electronic things together.
The jefe running the place asked a student to hand me a small phillips head
screwdriver, whereupon the student handed me a slot head screwdriver. There
ensued a discussion between the jefe and the student about the difference
between phillips head and slot head (I am not making this up), at the
conclusion of which I finally secured the loan of a small phillips head
screwdriver.

Two minutes later my computer was happily booting into Ubuntu.

The point is that the continual corruption I have been experiencing may have
nothing to do with ext3. 
_______________________________________________
PLUG mailing list
PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug