Hi, I've been experiencing intermittent filesystem corruption on a Compaq Armada M700 laptop w/ IBM Travelstar 30GB drives (both the 40GN and 30GN models). This happens mostly under RH 7.2, w/ ext3 filesystems, but I think it's also happened under win98. All seems fine until power-down, power-up, and boot, where the corruption is discovered. Searching these archives, I found that there are known problems with laptops and certain IBM hard drives, having to to with cache problems in the drive on powerdown, and that there are windows errata to workaround the problems. (msgs 2428, 2433, 2435 in this archive.) Q: Are my drives known to be bad? Is there a list somewhere? Q: What are the workarounds for RH and windows alluded to? I have some utilities downloaded from IBM, which I vaguely remember may let me change/disable cache modes. I'm gonna shut down now and give that a try. Thanks for any help... David Potterveld
On Mar 12, 2002 02:03 -0600, David Potterveld wrote:> I've been experiencing intermittent filesystem corruption on a Compaq Armada > M700 laptop w/ IBM Travelstar 30GB drives (both the 40GN and 30GN models). > This happens mostly under RH 7.2, w/ ext3 filesystems, but I think it's also > happened under win98. All seems fine until power-down, power-up, and boot, > where the corruption is discovered. Searching these archives, I found that > there are known problems with laptops and certain IBM hard drives, having to > to with cache problems in the drive on powerdown, and that there are windows > errata to workaround the problems. (msgs 2428, 2433, 2435 in this archive.) > > Q: Are my drives known to be bad? Is there a list somewhere? > Q: What are the workarounds for RH and windows alluded to? > > I have some utilities downloaded from IBM, which I vaguely remember may let > me change/disable cache modes. I'm gonna shut down now and give that a try.I think the Debian folks put an "hdparm" command near the end of the shutdown to suspend the drive (which forces a cache flush). Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto, \ would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?" http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/ -- Dogbert
Hi, On Tue, Mar 12, 2002 at 02:03:57AM -0600, David Potterveld wrote:> I've been experiencing intermittent filesystem corruption on a Compaq Armada > M700 laptop w/ IBM Travelstar 30GB drives (both the 40GN and 30GN models). > This happens mostly under RH 7.2, w/ ext3 filesystems, but I think it's also > happened under win98. All seems fine until power-down, power-up, and boot, > where the corruption is discovered. Searching these archives, I found that > there are known problems with laptops and certain IBM hard drives, having to > to with cache problems in the drive on powerdown, and that there are windows > errata to workaround the problems. (msgs 2428, 2433, 2435 in this archive.) > > Q: Are my drives known to be bad? Is there a list somewhere?No idea --- what's the full drive ID for the disks? And no, I don't know of any exhaustive list of exactly which drives have the problem.> Q: What are the workarounds for RH and windows alluded to?RH? Try the current rawhide kernel --- it includes IDE patches which force a cache flush on powerdown (some distributions have initscripts hacks to force this already.) Those patches are in the -ac kernels too, and we hope to see them in mainline 2.4.20. Windows? I have no idea. Cache-flush workarounds for powerdown won't save you if you let the battery run dry, of course. Cheers, Stephen