At 19:11:56 on Tuesday Tuesday 16 November 2010, Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> wrote:
On 2010/11/16 16:41 (GMT+0200) Stan Goodman composed:
Felix Miata wrote:
Before doing much of anything else, run Seagate's diagnostic software on the device to see the bad sector status. Is the Seagate out of warranty already? For several years its HDs had 5 year warranties. Since then, I think they all carry 3 unless purchased as a refurb or as part of an OEM system.
I'll look for the diagnostic software on the Seagate site. Do you recall the name of the file?
Used to and may still be Seatools, but I never get it from Seagate. Along with equivalent tools from other brands and much much more it's included on the diagnostic CD everyone should have from http://ultimatebootcd.com/
I downloaded a bootable DOS file from Seagate and put it on a mini-CD; tomorrow sometime I'll run it. I'll try to get similar files for the Hitachi and for the Western Digital in the laptop. In the process of burning the Seagate iso, I discovered that K3b isn't working right either. I burned the file in the laptop.
If the warranty was for three years, it will be marginal, but the place I bought the drive will know.
One thing to try if it passes the above test, since you have so much freespace available is to create another partition, mkfs it as something other than ext4, copy the entirety of /home to it, umount home, make the new your /home in fstab, and see what happens on successive boots. If nothing bad seems to happen, you might re-mkfs the original, recopy /home content back, change fstab back, and see if it's OK as other than ext4.
Why must it be an fs other than ext4?
To rule out ext4 as the problem itself? It's too young for me to use here. I stick with the familiar that all kernels under this roof understand.
With only one SATA HD (and no connected USB storage) in the system the BIOS will not be causing any "confusion", but the way I remember SATA port behavior you can expect Grub to need reinstalling as a (hd0,6) device instead of the (hd1,6) that it was. Why not disconnect the Seagate, connect the Hitachi, and see if Grub will boot 11.1 to find that out?
I asked about confusion because I also mentioned the possibility of connecting the second disk (Hitachi) as well.
I think now that all the basics (other than the fsck problem) are functioning on the Seagate, plugging in the Hitachi should not disrupt anything, as long as the BIOS maintains the Seagate as priority the over Hitachi.
I'll connect the Hitachi instead of the Seagate as you suggest. I can't think that either of us would be optimistic that it will boot.
If you have a floppy with Grub on it you could start it and get booted manually as you had been from HD in recent weeks, then put Grub somewhere other than where it is now (sdb6?) as emergency tool for getting booted while a normal sda is absent. Grub need not be on / or /boot. That's just a convention. As long as you know how to use the Grub shell, all you need is a partition it can recognize and with stage1 installed, and a /boot/grub directory containing stage2, where you could also put another menu.lst.
Or, if planning not to replace the Seagate, just go ahead and install 11.3 to new partitions on the Hitachi as sda, and use 11.3's Grub to boot 11.1 if and when you need it. That way you'd be able to choose 11.3's Grub from BM whenever the Hitachi appears as (hd0), and 11.1's Grub from BM whenever the Hitachi appears as (hd1).
-- Stan Goodman Qiryat Tiv'on Israel -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org