On 2025-03-04, Avon Robertson <avo...@xtra.co.nz> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 04, 2025 at 09:18:18AM +0100, Jan Stary wrote: >> > > wrdl5# fsck -t ffs /dev/sd1e >> > > ** /dev/rsd1e >> > > >> > > CANNOT READ: BLK 128 >> > > CONTINUE? [Fyn] y >> > > >> > > THE FOLLOWING DISK SECTORS COULD NOT BE READ: 128, 129, 130, 131, >> > > 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, >> > > /dev/rsd1e: CANNOT READ DISKLABEL >> > > wrdl5# >> > > >> > > The laptop concerned is a Dell M6600 circa 2011 that I have >> > > owned since it was new. All internal components are original >> > > including the 2 750Gb spinning disks. >> > > >> > > Is the fsck failed partition recoverable, or should I assume >> > > the sd1 disk is at end of (a long) life?
Seems fairly likely to be a failing disk. If you have data you want to get off it, you might get somewhere dd'ing what you can to another drive and reinstating a partition table (I guess you can't get at the usual backup as it's in /var, but if it was installed long enough ago to use FFS1, scan_ffs might help find where the filesystems are). (If normal dd fails, a specialist "recovery dd" like diskrescue may help). You may be able to trigger reallocation by attempting writes (e.g. dd'ing /dev/zero over the disk) which might get it working again but I wouldn't want to use it for anything important. >> > Get a SSD; those are reasonably cheap now >> > and the machine will be considerably faster. > > AFAIK this laptop cannot be upgraded with M.2 NVMe SSD's. It is SATA though; SATA 2.5" SSDs are still easily available from high quality manufacturers. (PATA is more difficult). Depends how much you want to put into maintaining what is a fairly old laptop - newer ones (even used ones from a few years ago) are considerably faster and likely to use a fair bit less power. > I have > intended to get a new snappy arm64 or riscv64 laptop for months, but > other than an unsupported Macbook M4 I have not found one. M1 macbook or one of the supported Qualcomm-based ones are most likely to be usable for arm64. Newer supported macbooks either don't have working wifi (M2 pro) or AIUI have some issues with wifi (non-pro M2). So you will be stuck with USB wired ethernet, or USB wifi and a USB C-A adapter. Graphics not accelerated, not unusably slow but use a fair bit more cpu power than otherwise. Packages are in reasonably decent shape on arm64 but are a bit worse than amd64. M3/newer, obviously no support in OpenBSD, no support in Asahi Linux yet either. OpenBSD/riscv64 does not have that many users, and overall software support for riscv64 is fairly far behind arm64 (popular machines like the Apples and Raspberry Pi mean that across the open-source software ecosystem a lot of people have had access to arm64 hardware - not so much the case for riscv64). I would not choose riscv64 unless wanting to do work to improve things on the platform. -- Please keep replies on the mailing list.
