On Wednesday 29 March 2006 13:15, James Wilkinson wrote: > Ouch. This is one of the big problems with a traditional Unix mailbox: > when the mailbox gets large, programs have to do large amounts of > re-ordering and rewriting to delete e-mails, and there's a lot of scope > for things to go wrong. > > But I'm still surprised that the FAT32 filesystem was the problem. I > can't recall an occasion when that gave any problems. Have you checked > smartctl -l error /dev/hda (assuming that it's an IDE disk)? Have you > checked memtest86? I *have* experienced problems with disk and memory... > Unrelated to mail, but I had a bad experience once with FAT32 partitions. I had some left over from dual-boot days, and filled them mainly with photos. I had a cpu-fan failure that took out the motherboard. When I rebuilt I found that the ext3 partitions were fine, but the FAT32 ones were completely hosed. I tried every recovery tool I could find, recovering some files, but losing every .jpg on there. I've never trusted a vfat partition since. I note that man pages regarding partitioning tell you to let windows format partitions to be used by windows, and linux to format partitions to be used by linux. I think that says it all. Anne
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