> Subject: Re: Dead disk > > > On 16/06/06, James Wilkinson <fedora@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I asked: > > > * Have you tried booting into runlevel 3 and run as much > as you know > > > how to in text mode? Something involving /dev/urandom, > bzip2 and cmp > > > might be a good idea. > > > > Dotan Cohen wrote: > > > Could you elaborate a bit more on this? I'm araid that my > power over > > > the command line is very limited. And I'm not exactly a CS major! > > > > Well, how often does the system crash if you just leave it alone in > > runlevel 5? It sounds like it's a few times an hour. If so, > just leave > > it for three hours, and use the uptime command to make sure > it hasn't > > crashed and rebooted. > > > > I would have suggested something like > > > > [james@kendrick tmp]$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=testcase bs=1M count=10 > > 10+0 records in > > 10+0 records out > > 10485760 bytes (10 MB) copied, 3.32386 seconds, 3.2 MB/s > > > > to generate a 10 MB test case, > > > > [james@kendrick tmp]$ bzip2 -k testcase > > > > to bzip2 it (the -k keeps the original), > > > > [james@kendrick tmp]$ bzcat testcase.bz2 > testcase2 > > [james@kendrick tmp]$ cmp testcase testcase2 > > > > to uncompress it to a different file, and to check that the > result is > > the same as the original. > > > > This ought to exercise the kernel, the processor, and > memory. If you use > > a large enough testcase, it will exercise disk, as well. > > > > Or, if you've got space, you could just > > tar jcf ~/usr.tar.bz2 /usr > > to tar up the contents of /usr. > > > > Hope this helps, > > > > James. > > Ah, I see what you're up to. I'll put the machine to work and see what > it does. If it crashes, in what logs should I look? I've already > peaked into most of what's in /var/log but didn't see anything that > looked like a crash report. But as that's the first time I've ever > looked at those logs, I could be wrong. I'm not familiar with them. > I realize I came into this discussion late and this may have already been tried, but if you boot to single user mode via the recovery disk and run fsck -c -c /dev/... This will do a non-destructive check of all the blocks in the file system. If the probem is caused by a disk problem, this may show it. Bob Styma
