On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 08:49:26PM +1300, cr wrote: > On Thu, 09 Oct 2003 03:49, Pigeon wrote: > > On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 08:11:53PM +1300, cr wrote: > > > On Tue, 07 Oct 2003 07:04, Pigeon wrote: > > > > On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 05:09:29AM +1300, cr wrote: > > > > > I've only had one sieze in recent times, what I've had several of > > > > > recently is sudden complete power cut - possibly a power supply > > > > > fault. Either way, it has the same effect of discombobulating my hard > > > > > drive so I have to do a lot of fscking on startup again. > > > > > Occasionally this completely munges my X setup. > > > > > > > > I think you might find ext3 to be a big help, though it's not a > > > > complete solution - if the power dies in the middle of a write, you > > > > can end up with a bad sector being created, which can confuse things a > > > > bit. > > > > > > Are there any downsides to ext3? > > > > If you have a filesystem with a dirty journal you MUST try and replay > > the journal, ie, fsck it, before doing anything else with it. If you > > forget this you'll probably end up with worse damage than if you made > > the same mistake with ext2. ext3 can be mounted as ext2 in emergency, > > eg. if your rescue kernel hasn't got ext3 support, but don't be > > tempted to mount it read-write. > > I think, with my capability for pushing the wrong button at critical > moments, I might be safer to stick with ext2 then.
Well, I admit that I found out about this the hard way. But I think that was when I was running slink; the woody versions of the tools all seem to spit out warnings if you try and treat ext3 as ext2. AIUI running fsck on ext2 will return the filesystem to a logically consistent state but doesn't guarantee that you won't lose or corrupt any files - as you've found out. ext3's journalling is a big safeguard against this. It is unfortunate that power failures are one area where this safeguard is noticeably incomplete. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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