Beso <givemesug...@gmail.com> posted d257c3560901221141g57061763y2cdb773058920...@mail.gmail.com, excerpted below, on Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:41:18 +0100:
>> Not that anyone else necessarily needs to use my "everything portage >> touches on one partition" strategy, but I certainly learned /my/ >> lesson, and don't intend on screwing /that/ one up here again. It's >> worth considering, anyway. YMMV. >> > i really don't really understand how you could have had this issue if > you'd mount the > lvm partition at boot via fstab. it's most likely to not happen > anything. It seems I need to explain a bit further... My triggering problem was that my A/C died, in Phoenix, AZ, in the summer, where it's not unusual to see 45C/115F in the shade, but the computer was left running in the hot house where the ambient air temp likely hit 60C/140F, and the still-spinning disks would have easily hit 70C and may have been as high as 85C! What happened was that under those conditions, the platter expanded such that the heads were fully crashed, scratching grooves into it. Wherever the heads moved while the disk was overheated like that, was very quickly an unreadable mess! Well, as alluded to previously, I had backup partitions of most everything. They weren't mounted at the time and weren't read/written, so didn't get grooved out and survived pretty much intact. The problem was that I ended up with a mix of some "current" partitions and some backup partitions and a package database that wasn't at all in sync with what was actually on disk. What was on disk was still operational, and I actually ran the disks for some time (after getting a new A/C and cooling everything off, obviously) without a problem with further data loss, but as I said previously, I learned my lesson. Now, everything portage touches including the database it keeps track of it all in is on the same partition, so if for whatever reason I have to revert to the backups, the older snapshot is consistently the same age, and the package database remains in sync with what's actually running. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
