[PLUG] Bad-mouthing ext3

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 1 Dec 2006 07:21:35 -0800
"William A Morita" <wamorita at hevanet.com> dijo:

> 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. 

Guess I'm not a self-respecting Linux user. But bear in mind that my
backpack already weighs nearly as much as I do. OK, that may be a
slight exaggeration. But in addition to the computer have to schlepp
half a dozen books, notebooks, computer peripherals, microphone,
headset, and even my lunch 20 km to PSU and back. Not sure a CD would
hold up very well in that environment.

Also, the first thing I did at the help desk in the basement of Smith
was to ask if anyone had a Knoppix or other live CD. The girl at the
counter went around to everyone asking if anyone had an "optics" CD.
(I'm taking Phonetics, I know what she said.) Anyway, upon discovering
what a Knoppix live CD was she suggested the CAT people in the 4th
Avenue building. It was on the way there that I realized that the
problem was probably the hard disk. 

Meantime I am working on a permanent solution. When I got home last
night I removed the hard disk to see if I might be able to fix it. I
was assuming that I had a faulty connector in the drive bay. I arrived
at this assumption because the problem occurred with two different hard
disks, the original and the new 80 GB 7200 rpm one that I replaced it
with. The culprit had to be either the connector in the drive bay or
the connector on the drive, and it would be unlikely to have bad drive
connectors with two brand new hard disks from different manufacturers.

But when I opened the drive bay and took a closer look I realized that
the hard disk connector was not meshing completely into the connector
in the drive bay. It was about 5 mm back from where it should have
been. The problem was that the screw holes in the sides of the drive
bay cover were 5 mm too far back. HP/Compaq should have made the holes
elliptical so I could slide the drive back and forth a bit, but the
holes are just plain round holes. I also noticed that the drive was not
fully down into the connector.

I solved the first problem by removing the screws and just leaving them
out. And I also placed a shim between the drive and the drive bay cover
to force it down more into the connector. So far my fix seems to be
working. If the drive slides around too much because of the missing
screws, then I'll get out the Dreml tool and fix the holes, or get out
the super glue or something. As a self-respecting Linux user I must be
prepared to get physical with my computer from time to time. Oh, and I
now pack a small screwdriver. :)

I just wanted to post that evidently there is nothing wrong with ext3.
Because I was having continual corruption I had assumed there must be
some glitch in ext3 when used on an amd-64 kernel or something. This
happened off and on from the first day after receiving the brand new
computer, and it seemed to me that a software problem was far more
likely than a brand new computer with component problems -- especially
as I know a couple of others with the same computer running Windows,
and they never had any problem.