Juan Piñeros wrote:
In machine1 hdparm is not currently installed, but it was 1 year ago when the
machine1 had woody installed. I suppose hdparm does not change anything to
the disk itself but only to the ide modules of the kernel?
Hdparm is a powerful tool that can activate/deactivate some feature/mode
of your ATA hard disk. It can tweak various disk parameter using the ATA
driver of the kernel. But, as the manual reports, various feature are
dangerous and if not used correctly can cause data corruption. As
happened to me... ;-)
But since one of your machine haven't got hdparm installed, it doesn't
seem to be the cause.
In machine2, hdparm is installed, but I do not remember to have changed
anything to the configuration of it (the log file I was maintaining for
machine2 was lost during the disk crash). Do I have to check something or
simply uninstall it?
In my system there is the boot script "/etc/init.d/hdparm" that read the
configuration file "/etc/hdparm.conf". The last file is a list of
feature that you can use: on my system i have never touched it and it is
still in the maintainder default status, that is pratically all
commented out.
Your problem is a tipical one that can make you crazy.
I think you have to check all the things that your machine has in
common, expecially on the software side. It doesn't seems to be an
hardware problem, since the two machine has so different components...
The machine2, in particular, is a common hardware platform with a
popular chipset...
If i were you, i'll start to try this things:
- search on the internet if there are known problem regarding kernel 2.6
and FAT partition, in particular if created by WinXP;
- boot with a 2.4 kernel and check if the problem persists;
- if possible, try with a USB key or, better, a USB external drive,
formatted FAT by WinXP and see if there are corruptions on that drive; i
suggest to use a partition as similar as possible to the ones you have
on your notebook: same dimension and same type (FAT32);
- if possible, try to reformat one of the partition with a win98 format
or with mkfs.vfat and see it the problem persists.
Since you have told that on one machine there where Woody installed, i
suppose that the problem didn't existed at that time, is it true?
Good luck.
Cesare.
