On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, Shlomi Fish wrote:
>
> It all started when I wanted to try out the latest beta of KDE 2.1. Why?
> Mainly because my own library was utilized in its implementation of
> Solitaire suite (kpat). I downloaded the RPMs, but then I relized I needed
> Mandrake 7.2 to install them, while I only had 7.1 at home. So, I decided
> to upgrade.
A second option would have been to download the source RPMs and rebuild
them with your system.
Note that you would need to do such thing incrementally:
rebuild qt
upgrade qt
rebuild kdelibs
upgrade kdelibs
etc.
Reading the rest of your story, I tend to believe that this would have
caused much less troubles.
>
> Downloading the image of the installation CD was a breeze because I have
> an ADSL connection and iglu.org.il has a mirror of it in Israel. I burned
> the CD using my CD-burner, and checked that all the files on it were
> present. They were.
>
> I tried to upgrade and eventually managed to do so, while using the Custom
> mode. My system seemed to have run OK, but then I tried to do too many
> things at once (one of them was mounting a CD ISO on a loop partition, and
> the other was running Apache and getting a CGI script, and of course X and
> KDE were running), so my machine got stuck and I had to reboot. I think
> that's what created the bad sectors.
I don't think it is caused by the "heavy load".
I'm not a hardware expert, but maybe there were some defective file before
the crash, and they caused the crash?
>
> In any case, when I logged in again, I realized several packages had
> several versions installed. Maybe I did not do the upgrade properly or
> something like that, but I didn't like it all. I decided the best solution
> for the problem was to re-install a clean system.
>
> I tried re-installing over the existing partition while not formatting it,
> but it took too much time and eventually got stuck. Luckily, I have one
> partition dedicated for /home, so formatting the root did not cause me to
> lose too many important files. I decided to format the root partition, and
> install a clean system on it.
What is this option exactly? When installing a new system, it seems
logical that you would start with a blank system. I can think of many
potential problems caused by the fact that / is not formatted.
But I personally don't like the "if it's not working: reinstall" approach.
>
> This seemed to work, however I noticed that I sometimes gets shrieks from
> my hard-disk - for instance when I run PySol. I spent an entire day trying
> to analyze that, and I finally managed to have a very small Tcl/Tk script
> (BTW, I don't like Tcl) which reproduces the problem. However, I couldn't
> exactly which file caused it.
Again, me software guy says 'hardware problem'.
>
> Eventually, I noticed that when I run GNOME and execute a KDE
> application, I get this kind of noise only that it stops. After I run "cat
> libqt.so | wc -c" I found out this file was problematic. I re-installed
> the Qt package (rpm -i --replacepkgs qt-blah-blah.i586.rpm) and managed to
> get KDE running without problems.
>
> However, Qt has nothing to do with Tcl/Tk, so I had check further.After
> running the following script under /usr:
>
> find . -type f |
> (while read T ;
> do
> echo $T ;
> echo ;
> cat $T | wc -c ;
> done)
>
> I managed to find one or two files that were problematic, one of them was
> an X font. I accidently triedto re-install the XFree86 package while X
> was running, so I rebooted, copied the package to the hard-disk and
> re-installed it from there while in a virtual console.
>
> That solved the problem, and I could get PySol as well as that Tcl/Tk
> script to runflawlessly. So, after a full day of trying to solve this
> problem and more Linux reboots than I have ever done otherwise, I was
> finally content with myself.
>
> The morals of the story are:
>
> 1. Mandrake should include a separate distinct path for upgrading a
> system, in a similar way to what RedHat has. That will eliminate the
> confusion that I felt when trying to upgrade.
> 2. Mandrake should make sure that when upgrading, they don't keep the old
> copy of the old package.
> 3. To find defect files the script above is your friend. However, I do
> suggest that you pipe the output of "find . -type f" to a file first.
'rpm -Va' can also be useful. It alos compares md5sums of all files that
are supposed to be unmodified to the ones that were stored at install
time.
> 4. Never do too many things at once that your machine can't handle.
Well, if you have a large-enough swap, than your system is not supposed to
hang that easily. It may get sluggish when not enough memory is availble,
but you have anough time to stop one of the bigger memory consumers.
> 5. The ReiserFS people should provide a sector checking and marking
> utility for ReiserFS.
>
> Cheers and happy and flawless hacking,
:)
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
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