RedHat Disk Dangers? [was: Linux and ADSL]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Scott" == Scott Stone <SStone@example.com> writes:

    Scott> why?  7.0 did something that I've never, in over 6 years of
    Scott> using Linux, come across.  For no reason at all, just
    Scott> COMPLETELY trashed my ext2fs file system to the point where
    Scott> /usr/lib was no longer a directory and /lost+found
    Scott> contained only spotty remnants of what used to be in there.
    Scott> No bad sectors on the disk

I've seen this.  I think it's a hardware problem in my case.  It's a
Fujitsu MO drive, media 217MB formatted IIRC.  But the ext2fs would
happily write past physical capacity and start reusing in-use blocks.
And trashing directories.  Including the /lost+found directory.  Oops.

Fortunately, that was for backup only and I found out about the
problem before I needed it....  :-)

Debian 1.2 (at that time), custom kernel 2.2.SingleDigit vintage,
vanilla Linus sources, no patches.  Didn't matter whether it was
mke2fs /dev/sdc or fdisk /dev/sdc1, mke2fs /dev/sdc1.  Red Hat
_always_ fucks with the sources, and unless you read the RPM spec
_and_ the patches, you never know what you're getting.  "Trust Big
Red" ... about as far as I could throw a sack with Bill Gates and Bob
Young in it.

As you say, I've never seen this on a fixed disk, and only on that
particular hardware in fact.


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