I hesitate to burden the list with an email that's more reminiscent of "Days of our Lives" than a bug report, but having suggested a couple of days ago that there might be problems with Linux's handling of memory or SCSI interfaces, I thought it might be constructive to report that the problems I encountered had nothing to do with Linux, Debian, or any of the utilities I was using, and everything to do with cleaning. I also thought it might be useful to summarize 'lessons learned'.
In order to clean the inside of the box that had the 9 GB drive on it, the outer casing of the box had to be slid off. The box hadn't been constructed all that perfectly, so when the lid was finally removed, the drive heads got a real physical jolt. Basically, I was over-optimistic about the ruggedness of the Micropolis drive (which is now 2 years old). I suspect that the heads were misaligned when the box casing was removed, and that caused the errors when I rebooted. (The answer to questions about what I used for cleaning is: a nearly dry damp cloth. I gave the box lots of opportunity to dry after I cleaned it, so I don't think the two drops of water in the cloth was a problem. In fact I suspect that cleaning without a little water is sometimes more of a problem, due to static.) Lessons learned: -- Running fsck once on a broken partition isn't enough. It must be run more than once, especially if fsck ever asks: ... Ignore<y>? -- Use 'reboot -n' after running fsck (suggestion from Sherwood Botsford). -- (of course) back up early and often. Reading and then applying the documentation on the 'tob' backup script is not only a lot less painful than going through the trauma that I went through for the last two days; it is actually pleasurable reading, a real rarity! Thanks to all for sympathy and suggestions while I was in the pits. Susan Kleinmann
