Re: Crashed hard disk - no jehad

["Dr. P. Sriram" <sriram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

dear luggies,

let us not start a jehad over this 'windows does not crash - but linux
does' blah blah blah. i will try a cool-headed answer.

most modern operating systems (even windows) do lots of disk operations
and many of these operations are asynchronous - meaning the actual disk
operation may occur well after the system tells you that it is done. for
these systems, a power failure is a problem in that pending operations
will not be completed, leading to inconsistency in the disk file system. 
windows handles this by running scandisk if it was not shut down properly
(or if power went down).  if the power fails a couple of times while the
scandisk is being run, the system will be beyond recovery and the os will
have to be reinstalled. the same is true of linux (or most any other unix)
as well. since unix systems tend to be more disk dependant (due to the
multi-user multi-tasking nature), the problem is likely to be more severe
and a ups is strongly recommended. one way to partly get out of this is to
run a combination of journaling and read-only-mounted file systems. one
would mount /usr as read-only (journaling not needed); the file systems
that are written to may be made journaling (reiserfs or xfs, when that
becomes available) so they will also not suffer from a power outage. many
commercial unix systems (irix and aix, i know) do this by default. 

sriram

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