Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sun, 26 Jan 1997 14:29:10 -0500 (EST) | From | "Richard B. Johnson" <> | Subject | Controller trashes FS (what's new) |
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I have been having trouble with SCSI Controllers. I got this Pentium System with an AHA-2940 Controller. The aic7xxx driver is apparently not being maintained so no bugs were getting fixed. These bugs were not killers, just little things like:
o System crashes when you execute ls on a MS-DOS file system if the partition size is greater than 500 megabytes. These things were reported by myself and others during the past year.
o System crashes when I attempt to use an EXABYTE tape drive. This was explained as a fault of the controller to properly handle disconnect (EXABYTE doesn't run sync and doesn't disconnect).
Anyway..............
So therefore, I spent a lot of money and bought a Bus Logic BT-958 SCSI Controller. This had been recommended because, amongst other things "It had the best written Linux driver"....
Last night it trashed 3 file-systems, two were not even mounted. The Linux root partition was not recognizable as a file-system of any known type. This is an ext2 file-system. My "/home/user" partition was not repairable using e2fsck although I was able to copy scrambled files off to a network file-server. Most are 'C' sources and can be repaired.
Two file-systems that were not even mounted was my MS-DOS boot partition on a completely different drive, and a unnamed 32-bit operating system that I designed a few years ago. These things should not ever have been touched! They were completely "unknown" to Linux, they were on different physical devices than anything Linux uses.
I have not been able to do backups since my tape drive didn't work with the ADAPTEC controller. Now that I had a new controller installed, and now that I was able to read and write to the Tape Drive, I confidently told crond to make a backup...
# # Backup procedure # LOG="/root/logs/backup.log" TAPE="/dev/st0" cd / /bin/date>${LOG} /bin/tar -cvlf ${TAPE} . >>${LOG} #/bin/mt offline /dev/st3 /bin/date>>/${LOG} exit 0
This kicked off last night at 2 AM. I came in this morning to retrieve my first backup tape that I would have ever been able to make on this machine. Instead of a backup, the system was trashed.
I have been backing up Linux on another machine. It is only a 486 and it uses a slow-speed ADAPTEC controller.
The only way I can backup this machine is to tar everything off to the Network. This is why it has now taken 11 hours for me to get this machine back up. I will never be able to restore anything that I had on the 32-bit operating system partition because it did not have a file-system that was recognized by Linux. Therefore I was never able to back it up. To recover this, will require about 20 hours of feeding in floppies. This is not fun.
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