Thank you Stuart. See inline and below. On Tue, Mar 04, 2025 at 10:32:41AM -0000, Stuart Henderson wrote: > 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
Snappy as in approaching, or >, than a Macbook Pro M4 processor. > > 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. > I have good data backups to install in a new laptop and I believe that is the wise course of action. Thank you again Jan and Stuart for your comments. Regards, Avon
