[mythtv-users] Disk-drive hiccups

[Bob Sully]

Hi all -

Over the past several weeks, I have been having occasional instances of
partitions becoming inaccessible suddenly.  This has only happened with
the two partitions I use for Myth recordings and for video files.  Both of
these are large JFS filesystems, have been for over a year with no prior
problems.  Both were initially 700GB partitions; I recently upgraded both
drives to 1.5TB units.  I used the -c switch when doing the format (took
several hours on the 1.5T drives).  Even so, this is still happening;
sometimes it happens after an hour or two of playing media, sometimes when
the system is idle (which is a real problem if the drive isn't available
when a recording starts (this happened once)).

It's not a drive problem (hardware) because it's happened with the 750s as
well as the 1.5T drives.  I'm wondering if it's a problem with JFS...?  I
don't want to go to ext3 because it takes a week (not literally, but it
seems like it) to fsck a big ext3 partition.  Would anyone recommend that
I change over to XFS?

Another cause COULD be software.  I had been running Ubuntu 8.10-x64, then
upgraded to 9.04.  Soon afterward I started noticing this issue.  Has
anyone else seen this since a Jaunty upgrade?

I'm using Jean-Yves' upgraded 0.21 binaries with VDPAU, which I'm quite
happy with.  This is a NOT a Myth issue, because I can't seem to access
the involved drive outside of Myth, either, after this happens; the only
fix appears to be a reboot.   I don't see anything in the system logs
which would clue me in as to WHY this happens, only that the OS can't
access the involved partition afterward.

I did notice that when this happened yesterday, the involved drive
designator changed over from /dev/sdb to /dev/sdd....!  Curiouser,
curiouser!  I've not seen that happen before.

Any ideas would be appereciated.  Thanks.
Bob
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________________________________________
Bob Sully - Simi Valley, California, USA
http://www.malibyte.net
http://www.malibyte.com