newmoon update

[solarbird]

Did more testing; there are hard errors all across root. The partition table looks okay but there are errors in /dev (?!) so I don't know how much has been lost. I'm offering no guarantees of mail spool recovery, though I don't know of any specific issues. /home looks okay so far, but no promises.

Anna and I ran down to Fry's for an assortment of bits. I've got a new drive and am formatting it for ext2 now before reinstalling the OS.

Comments

[smeehrrr.livejournal.com]

You get the $120 Maxtor 250?

[solarbird]

Oh, they were well out of that loss-leader by the time we got down there. No, we just got another 120G. And we got a Western Digital, since it was a Maxtor which boned us this morning.

(It was ugly, too. The best part is that it's failing progressively. /etc went away between this morning and this evening. Data loss, ho. :-p )

[smeehrrr.livejournal.com]

I have around 20 of those Maxtor 250s and I haven't lost one yet. Of course it's only been a few months and they run infrequently.

[solarbird]

Yeah, I figure we just got stupidly unlucky. :(

[cow.livejournal.com]

Any particular reason to use ext2 instead of ext3?

[solarbird]

Habit?

Well, that, and the install package we have on CD-ROM doesn't support ext3 at format time, and I don't want to get any trickier than we have to.

Plus, this was a hardware failure. Journaling wouldn't have done a whole lot of good. The only reason we got anything back was because I was able to mount root from a backup superblock. Can you even do that in ext3?

[cow.livejournal.com]

Dunno. :D I'm actually just learning a lot regarding filesystems, which is why I asked the question -- the senior sysadmin at my job is all, "ALWAYS always always use ext3", but never gives reasons, so I figured I'd ask why someone chose differently.

And your reasons make sense. :)

As for the mounting root from a backup superblock...I'll have to look into that.