Arch Linux

desertViking

Member

From: Arizona

Registered: 2005-10-30

Posts: 170

Hard disk maintenance

Hi,

I've had a couple of hard-locks in the last week.  I am writing it off to ndiswrapper at the moment because the locks would occur when I was doing some heavy downloads.  It occured most recently during a pacman system sync and upgrade.

The hard-locks required a hardware reset or power cycle to restart the computer.  The hard drive is partitioned with EXT3.

My question is this, when these things happen, is there recommended maintenance (aside from normal backup procedures) that one should perform, or will the journaling portion of the system keept things pretty honest?  A "check disk" procedure or anything?

I'm not looking for perfection and am willing to take some modest risks.  Just looking for advice on reasonable procedures when this happens.

Thx and regards.

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"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is."

T-Dawg

Forum Fellow

From: Charlotte, NC

Registered: 2005-01-29

Posts: 2,736

Re: Hard disk maintenance

there should be no or very little trouble with ext3 and corruption as long as you set that partition to a <pass> number in /etc/fstab. That will force a check on it during boot-up. 1 indicates the first priority of paritions to check then 2 and so on and so on. If its your root parition it should be checked first (1) then comes the boot parition if you have one (2)

man fstab for more info.

iphitus

Forum Fellow

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2004-10-09

Posts: 4,927

Re: Hard disk maintenance

To save your partition some trouble, often when there's a hard lock, magic sysrq key still works. enable the magic sysrq key, in /etc/sysctl.conf, run 'sysctl -p', and then when the lock happens, run this set of commands:
alt+sysrq+r
alt+sysrq+s
wait till your hdd stops
alt+sysrq+b

first one puts keyboard in raw mode, second syncs all mounted filesystems which makes them pretty much safe to power down on, third one reboots.

James

desertViking

Member

From: Arizona

Registered: 2005-10-30

Posts: 170

Re: Hard disk maintenance

Thanks for your advice.  I've checked my fstab settings and everything seems appropriate so that makes me feel better.

I've also taken notes on the sysrq instructions so that I am prepared next time. 

Today was a good day: learned something new.  Thx!

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"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is."