Re: Crashed hard disk.

[Prabhu Ramachandran <prabhu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

hi,

On Sun, 21 May 2000, T.P.Diraviam wrote:

> The file system on my hard disk with RH 6.1 Linux  crashed  beyond recovery
> when the power failed
> three or four times on one Sunday.
> The system recovered the first few times after
> running fschk manually as recommended.
> 
> Is this normal for Linux and is
> UPS mandatory?(Windows on the other
> hard disk  runs fine after such episodes!)

	I have had power failing while an fsck was going on and nothing
bad happened. Besides how do you know that it is unrecoverable? 

	In any case if you are running an important machine, backups are
always mandatory (no matter what OS you use :)

As regards prevention of such problems.  There are several things that you
can do. If you have multiple partitions mounted separately as /usr /home
/var /tmp /usr/local etc.  Then you could mount /usr /usr/local as read
only and prevent any necessity to fsck these when a crash occurs. 
Installing software is a minor pain since you need to do something like

mount -o remount,rw <readonly partition>
<rpm ,dpkg whatever> install package
mount -o remount,ro <partition>

	The best option is to get/buy SuSE 6.4 and partition your files
with reiserfs.  This is a journalling file system and you could just hit
reset on your machine and nothing bad will happen to the fs (We demo this
from time to time on our ilugc meetings :). While installing you will
however need to make a small ext2 boot partition for /boot for about 40
MB.  The rest of the partitions can be used with reiserfs. 

prabhu

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