Hi fellow Linux advocates. Need some advice.
Useful info
Machine: Athlon 750 Mhz
Disk: IBM Deskstar 46 GB
OS : Linux Mandrake 8.1 with updates
Filesystem: ext3
Install Path: Fresh installation with format of existing partitions.
Previously had Mandrake 8.0
This has happened 3 maybe 4 times with two of them being quite
painful. I use tune2fs to force an fsck on my disk on reboot. It
tells me that the drive is in an inconsistent state and I might lose
data. And we go through the fsck and it changes stuff.
I lost a tar file containing a pristine .tgz of Windows98 partition (I
still boot to that to watch DVDs occasionally, and when it louses
itself up -- I would roll it back using the tar file so I didn't have
to spend 10 hours reinstalling. It tooks 3 minutes instead).
Anyway, that file was painful to lose.
Latest I lost some files in the kdelibs rpm package. (something went
corrupted and so no kde program would run without immediately
crashing). I tried to fix them by doing an rpm -Uvh -replacepkgs and
it gave me a wierd error that it couldn't unlink one of the associated
files -- even though it wasn't in use and I was root. So I rebooted,
ran an fsck it said "you'll lose data" -- I said "ok" and it did it.
When the machine came back, I tried the rpm -Uvh --replacepkgs again
and it succeeded and I can run KDE programs again.
What gives? I don't know every single thing to know about a file
system, but this is definately getting old and I definately have data
that I don't want to lose (needless to say I'll be backing it up to CD
pronto).
I am planning on rebuilding this machine from scratch (I figured I'd
delay until Mandrake 8.2 comes out though because it's so close).
When I do should I bag ext3? Has there been fixes made since the
release of Mandrake 8.1? Should I go back to ext2 and live without
the Journal?
IBM's JFS is starting to look really good right now. I know that
there are people out there who swear by ResierFS.
Please help me through this unreliability crisis. :)
David.