[WBEL-users] That hard disk - again

Francies Moore liz at indract.freeserve.co.uk
Sun May 1 16:12:34 CDT 2005


Hi everyone,

Further to my earlier hard disk failure, it got weirder.

The secondary hard disk was replaced, and integrated into the 
filesystem.  It was mounted, as the previous one had been, as one large 
partition under /local (in order to take the Lotus Domino "home 
directory" and data).  The machine ran for a couple of days, and then 
died again.

This time the primary hard disk appeared to have failed.  
/var/log/messages came up with lines of errors - see 
http://www.thelinuxbox.me.uk/messages.jpg.  I ran hardware diagnostics 
(not linux) and the full read test hung, rather than come up with a 
fail.  The support company's technician removed the disk, and tried to 
clone it, but could not - he then said it was a bad disk.

However, I am told that both disks are OK now they have been low level 
formatted.  I left the server with two new hard disks in it running 
Knoppix from a CD.  I have been off sick ever since so got no further!

When the doctor allows me to return to work I shall have to reinstall 
WBEL.  But the nagging doubt is, what went wrong?  Could the cleaner 
maybe hitting the reset switch with her hoover have caused damage to the 
ext3 filesystem?  Obviously I would like to prevent this happening again 
- fortunately this is not a production server....

The only different thing about this system is that the CD drive is the 
primary master (/dev/hda) - could this setup cause problems?  The failed 
disks were /dev/hdb and /dev/hdc.

TIA

Francies



More information about the Whitebox-users mailing list