Re: [MiNT] file system check

[Evan Langlois <evan@coolrunningconcepts.com>]

On Fri, 2005-09-30 at 13:13 -0500, josephus wrote:

> I have a 160 mxxtor disk running Linux. The only problem is this 
> mechanism.  The disk requires a 8meg cache hit.  As a result I cannot 
> ever boot a clean disk.  My system boots and generally works. but I 
> cannot boot RO, the system will NEVER boot, it just reboots.  E2FSCK 
> will reports strange errors in the FILE SYSTEM>   Sync will not flush 
> this giant buffer.
> 
> So folks running large disks need to know that the on disk cache is much 
> larger than any sync will process.

If you think this is normal behavior you really need to hit yourself
over the head a few times with a brick until you knock some sense into
yourself.

Linux is quite happy with terabytes of storage and it most often, all
drives have a cache.   The sync call doesn't care how big your hardware
drive caches are.   Once a drive is unmounted, the file system is
guaranteed to be clean and will come back up clean, no matter how big
the cache.

I suggest you format the drive and start over.  Since you aren't using
journaling, either you NEVER power off your system without shutting down
and always run fsck at boot (multiple times if it finds an error) or
start using a journaled filesystem (ext2 converts to ext3 instantly).  

If you continue to have problems, throw the drive away.  Its faulty.  To
say that Linux can't handle a drive because it has an 8MB cache is
absurd.  Most drives you buy today have 8MB or more of cache.  

Please don't spread misinformation!!

-- Evan