i have this older system with a 20Gb maxtor IDE drive. i have been experiencing some weirdities therewith: on the largest partition (/dev/hda8), a number of write attempts can cause the rsync (or badblocks) process causing them to eat up all the system's resource to a point where there is no interaction possible with the system, not even through the tty console locally. killing the remote rsync usually rescues it after a couple of minutes, but the processor queue will then be in the excess of 40 or 50.
so my question: what's wrong, or should i just say bye to the harddrive and get a new one? and also, how can this happen? i understand that badblocks might get locked up trying to write if the harddrive is too broken to do it, but it's single-threaded, no? and when the process can't write, it goes into uninterruptible sleep mode. doesn't that mode allow the scheduler to use the (unused) processor for another process? how then can a queuelength of 40 or 50 come about? oh yeah, and of course there are no log entries or console output related to this. and the harddrive does not make funny noises or anything like that. it's just weird. -- martin; (greetings from the heart of the sun.) \____ echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:"; net@madduck NOTE: The pgp.net keyservers and their mirrors are broken! Get my key here: http://people.debian.org/~madduck/gpg/330c4a75.asc humpty was pushed.
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