[mythtv-users] Hard drive failure...

[Unit3]

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.

>Also, should I try and switch the file system (using linux default now -
>ext2 right?) to some journaled one or something "safer"?
>
It can't hurt, and may prevent a lot of problems if this happens again. 
I'd give ext3 a try, simply because you can switch back and forth from 
ext2 to ext3 with no problems in about a minute. There should be docs 
for your distro of choice on how to do this, but it's usually as simple 
as running "tune2fs -j /dev/hdaX", and then changing /etc/fstab's entry 
to ext3.

>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.

Give that a shot and let me know what the output is, I'm curious as to 
what would have cause such extensive damage.

Graeme