[mythtv-users] Hard drive failure...

[Cliff Draper]

From: Unit3 <unit3 at demoni.ca>
Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2003 12:51:01 -0600
> JC wrote:
> >This PC had run perfectly for about 2 years with Win2k and never a glitch of trouble.  Do you think turning on the dma stuff as suggested in the
> >setup/faq could have screwed it up?  If so, would it really take a few weeks to screw up?
> >
> This is technically possible with older hardware, but I find it highly 
> unlikely with new hardware, unless your IDE controller or something else 
> on your motherboard is also malfunctioning.

It seems pretty unlikely to me too.

> >Also, should I try and switch the file system (using linux default now -
> >ext2 right?) to some journaled one or something "safer"?

A journaled filesystem like ext3 works great as a filesystem for
normal files.  For the type of file usage that MythTV does (create a
huge file once, and then only do reads from it), it really only
provides 1 big advantage: fast fsck time due to better crash
tolerance.  Running fsck on a 100gig partition takes too long for
ext2, so I switched to ext3, and I've been pretty happy with it.
Here's my entry in /etc/fstab:
/dev/hda7	/data	ext3	defaults,noatime,data=writeback			0 2

> >What's the right/best way to repair the partition if any?
>
> I haven't had to do this in a while, but it seems to me that fsck should 
> have some options to do a more exhaustive disk scan... let's check the 
> man page! ;)
> 
> well, passing -c to e2fsck apparently forces it to run badblocks and 
> mark all corrupt blocks on your disk in the "bad block inode", which I 
> assume just keeps track of bad blocks so the fs doesn't try to use them. 
> Apparently using -c twice will force it to do a non-destructive 
> read-write test to do this, which is probably about as comprehensive as 
> you're going to get. Another possibly useful option is -f, which forces 
> a check even if it thinks it's fine.

I recently lost the hard drive on my MythTV's machine.  I ran the
badblock's non-destructive read-write test (which takes a long time to
run), and came up with nothing.  Apparently modern hard drives do
their own bad block reallocation automatically.  A lot of hard drives
have 3 year warranties, and so mine was still covered.  I ran Maxtor's
diagnostic program on it and got a failure.  After that, it was as
simple as RMA.

Cliff Draper    Sun Microsystems, Forte Tools
My opinions may or may not reflect those of my employer.
---------------------------- food for thought ---------------------------
The meta-Turing test counts a thing as intelligent if it seeks to
devise and apply Turing tests to objects of its own creation.