Re: hard disk fun == down time

[Christopher Faylor <cgf@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 08:32:36PM -0800, Jason Molenda wrote:
>On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 09:27:37PM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>The end result was that when I wrote to /dev/hda4, I was also randomly
>>writing to /dev/hda3.
>
>Ouch! It wasn't just a partition problem where they were overlapping or
>something like that?  I've seen that happen before, where you write to
>one of the partitions and you're scrubbing all over one of the other
>ones in the process.

Nah.  I'm pretty sure it was a linux problem.  I had the same problem
here (at home).  I spent a week staring at partition tables and then
one day I decided to upgrade the OS.  The problem just disappeared.

Both Jeff and I looked at the partition table and it looked fine,
AFAWCT.

>If that 9GB SCSI drive is still around, the vast majority of the
>web site is static.  99% of all the web pages on the site are
>mailing lists, and only a small fraction of those web archives have
>changed since the drive swap (i.e. the current month/quarter/year
>archives).  All of the other archives could be copied back from the
>SCSI drive on top of whatever's there now.

Yep.  That's what we plan on doing.  I think the old SCSI disk is more
recent than any of the tape backups of that disk.

Btw, I've just learned that /dev/hda1 was affected too.  Sigh.

cgf