I bet you’re getting sick of this - I know I am.
For the whole sorry tale, you can read Rants and Revelations: Computer again and all the links in it.
Today’s revelations follow.
The hard drive fails under the 2.6 kernel on the other machine - even with no other drives connected. That means it’s not the motherboard or the BIOS, at least. (I flashed the BIOS anyway, I figured it couldn’t hurt.) However, the drive works with the 2.4 kernel, and passes the Western Digital diagnostic program (one of my other drives failed, but it’s out of warranty anyway). However, in spite of that I have to assume that the problem is with the drive, or possibly the funky way it was partitioned.
Ages ago, the drive had 9 or 10 partitions. But the only partition I needed was hdc4, a primary partition. I deleted the other partitions and made one big partition 1 out of them. So I have a partition 1 and a partition 4. They don’t overlap or anything stupid like that. But I wonder if the new kernel doesn’t like something about that.
I’ve ordered a new hard drive. When it comes, I going to put the other one in the other box running Knoppix with the 2.4 kernel, and scp the entire contents over. Should only take a day or two.
Once that’s done, I’m betting even money that I’ll be able to repartition the drive and get it working just fine. I could either shove it into another computer, or maybe in one of the TiVos.
November 26th, 2004 at 08:51 GMT
If it makes you feel any better, I spent an hour or so on a laptop with a 2.6 kernel (he wanted Debian sarge put on it to replace a potato (!) install that worked fine). Every time the 3c59x driver loaded, the kernel would spew error messages at the console, the MAC was FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF, and obviously the wired connection didn’t work. I finally just blacklisted that driver, since the prof told me he didn’t care as much about wired networking as he did wireless, but I never did get sarge going on it - Ubuntu was ok though.
Anyway, yeah, I think there’s some little issues with 2.6 still, although IANAE.
December 1st, 2004 at 11:27 GMT
Last update on the hard disk problem (I hope)
Ok, hopefully last but hopefully not least: I took the disk that was failing (call it “A”) and the disk that normally lives in a USB external drive case (call it “B”) and put them in my Windows box and…