[xubuntu-users] Unexpected hard drive trashing

[Vincent Trouilliez]

Yorvyk <yorvik.ubunto at googlemail.com> wrote:

>
> No swap partition.
>
> Faulty drive or bad blocks?
>
> Have a look at /var/log/kern.log or run 'tail -f /var/log/kern.log' in a
> terminal to see what messages are coming up while this happens.
>


Hi Yorvyk,

You quoted my entire message so I don't know which of the problems you are
refering to. I assume you are refering to the trashing during boot time.

I didn't find anything in kern.log.  I do hav however something in
boot.log, see below :

***********************
dosfsck 3.0.13, 30 Jun 2012, FAT32, LFN
There are differences between boot sector and its backup.
Differences: (offset:original/backup)
  65:01/00, 90:33/0e, 91:c9/1f, 92:8e/be, 93:d1/74, 94:bc/7e, 95:f4/ac
  , 96:7b/22, 97:8e/c0, 98:c1/74, 99:8e/06, 100:d9/b4, 101:bd/0e, 102:00/cd
  , 103:7c/10, 104:88/eb, 105:4e/f5, 106:02/b4, 107:8a/00, 108:56/cd

< TRIMMED FOR LEGIBILITY >

  , 109:40/16, 111:08/00, 113:13/19, 114:73/eb, 115:05/fe, 116:b9/54
  , 488:61/00, 489:72/00, 490:72/00, 491:65/00, 492:72/00, 493:0d/00
  , 494:0a/00, 505:ac/00, 506:bb/00, 507:c9/00
  Not automatically fixing this.
/dev/sda7: clean, 151494/610800 files, 798558/2441872 blocks
/dev/sdb1: clean, 97122/30531584 files, 21668877/122096000 blocks (check in
2 mounts)
/dev/sda5: clean, 2889/305824 files, 60577/1220932 blocks
/dev/sda6: clean, 11/305824 files, 54364/1220932 blocks
/dev/sda8: clean, 122670/28385280 files, 29715301/113525322 blocks
/dev/sda1: 42565 files, 1085676/1219742 clusters
**************************************


This thing has been annoying me for... like 5 to 10 years !
But I don't think it is too serious. It happens on the first partition of
my first HDD: the FAT32 partition which hold Windows XP (the following
partitions cater for a couple Linux installations: one for testing
purposes, the last one for regular use). I tried formatting that partition
and re-installing Windows, no luck, still got these errors. Then tried
suppressing all partitions on that drive to start from a clean sheet...
still no luck ! So I though ok, maybe the drive is indeed faulty, so I got
a brand new one... still got these errors !! :-O So it was weird, but at
least I knew the original was probably not faulty in the end. So I though
maybe the drive controller on the mother board is somehow faulty ? So I
replaced the motherboard, along with brand new cables (switched from IDE to
SATA)... and the errors were still there !
this was now starting to look more strange than really scary anymore, so I
eventually stopped worrying about it, especially since the drive never
failed on me and never had  I/O errors no suffered any data loss or
anything... I just get these errors at every boot, but it's clearly not
related to faulty hardware, and it has no adverse effect. So I came to the
conclusion that it's just some problem specific to FAT32 file checking, the
utility maybe is a bit buggy.

That said, I would lobe to boot in TEXT mode to see what happens as the
hard drive trashes, but unfortunately there is this graphical boot splash
with a progress bar, which hides what's going on. I would love to get rid
of the graphics and just get the old text mode we used to have, with a fat
penguin/TUX in a corner of the screen, old fashion style :-)


--
Vincent Trouilliez
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