Sunday…all sorted!
Dec 2nd 2007PeterGetting My Life Back! & Tech stuff
And finally everything is back as it should be! Full raid, disk layout fine, all burning and turning!
I was talking to fellow blog master Mark about it, and he commented that this episode was hardly a good advert for Linux, which rather got me thinking about the last couple of weeks.
The initial failure was a hardware fault in the memory which manifested itself as disk corruption. However Linux uses a journaling file system logs disk transactions before they happen (large disk transactions are processor intensive, so most modern OSs delay disk writes until the processor isn’t doing other things – but a system crash can mean lost data that hasn’t been written to disk – which is why a computer should always be shut down properly, never just switched off)) Linux uses a journaling file system which logs potential disk transactions so if the system does crash, the journal can recover the expected transactions and make repairs. (Windows NTFS also uses a less robust form of journaling).
However in this case the potential corruption was so bad that Linux deactivated the disk so that no other damage could occur – a fact that I didn’t immediately recognise. If I had, I could probably have had the system up and running again within a day or so. As it was, I took the safe course and reloaded everything onto a new disk, got it all up, and then transferred it back to an array. What would have happened had I been using Windows? I’m not sure, but I doubt it would have been any easier. However, as Mark pointed out, having up-to-date backups would have helped!! (That is now in hand) Mark – enjoy your Apple Mac when it arrives – and remember that the underlying operating system is Linux based!
I said I would post some more photos of Olivia at a birthday party when I received them. I have and they are in the November Album in the Gallery (under Olivia).
I am off on another module of the computer course I started a month ago – this one is about networks, so I may not write for a few days – but keep watching this space!
O&U