I have been having alot of trouble with one of our machines, a K7 on a K7V133
motherboard, with an LVD 10,000 RPM Seagate Cheetah on an adaptec 19160 LVD
controller. Upon almost every boot, at least one of the four partitions on
/dev/sda will balk at fsck, forcing me to run e2fsck as root before resuming
the boot process. A number of complex problems have been experienced; I would
like to ask for some suggestions as to where to seek information that might
help lead to identification and resolution of the underlying problem. I am not
quite sure where to seek information or assistance on troubleshooting hardware
problems through GNU/Linux boot messages.
I had similar problems (segfaulting of e2fsck over and over until a fs was
unuseable). I removed one of the two DIMM memory modules; the problem had
seemed to resolve when Debian potato was reinstalled, and upgraded through
up-to-date sid. Indeed, Matrox G450 dual headed configuration worked fine.
But all along, there have been little inexplicable segfaults, using apt-get or
dpkg, and other times. OFTEN the dpkg config files, either
/var/lib/dpkg/status or /var/lib/dpkg/available would be corrupted. I wonder
whether this results after extensive, repeated fscks. I have had to edit these
files by hand, removing upper ASCII chars.
Eventually, I changed over to the other memory module, and again, things seemed
fine. For a while. Although I had the usual (or, in this case, I suppose I
ought to say extraordinary) "unstable" instabilities. I've had a lot of galeon
segfaults, and netscape started freezing up. I can't say anything about why.
However, the need to restart the system without shutting down leads again to
multiple e2fscks and perhaps further rotting of the filesystems.
At this point I suspect a SCSI HDD or adapter problem. I added the second
memory mod back in. I cannot say anything has improved.
One characteristic problem, that has started to recur, is segfaults during
e2fscks with extensive error messages including register dumps. Dpkg and
apt-get also segfault.
I plan to upgrade to the ext3 fs, to hopefully get around the need for so many
fscks. However, I cannot get linux-2.4.13.tar.gz cleanly onto my machine using
wget, after three attempts. Each time, tar gives a message part of the way
through about wrong header types.
Am I looking at a bad SCSI drive?
Thank you, if you have read this far!
Alan Davis
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 1-670-235-6580
Alan E. Davis, PMB 30, Box 10006, Saipan, MP 96950-8906, CNMI
I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free, so as to give up any
hypothesis, however much beloved -- and I cannot resist forming one
on every subject -- as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.
-- Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
