Am Montag, 30. Januar 2006 14:44 schrieb Carl Hartung:
Hi Martin, Hi Carl.... nice to read you ;-)
Before you reinstall again, from scratch (which is needed now,) boot into rescue mode, reiserfsck the filesystem for as many iterations as are needed to ensure it is clean, then mount the partition and manually erase the contents. This may seem hard to believe, at first, but the 'fast format' used during installation *does not* always prevent old data from 'bleeding through' from previously installed systems. When I moved to 10.0 from 9.3, I experienced this exact problem. It is a real "hair-puller" to diagnose. At the time, I 'met' others on this list (as well as on the opensuse list) who experienced the same problems.
That's tough... well, OK. just a couple of questions (as always ;-)) - When I start the system in rescue mode (from the install-DVD I assume) - where do I mount the partitions? Are there any predefined nodes? Or can I just "mkdir xyz" and then mount there? - My last install was a couple of weeks ago and I didn't check then but: Isn't there an option for "low level format" as well? - What does "manually erase" mean? "rm -R *" or do I have to mkfs? And finally - just to get that straight: Are you telling me, that data, that is actually just lurking around on the drive and does not belong to any block linked via an Inode (I assume that is what fast formatting does... deleting the directory structure without really touching the data-blocks) suddenly comes alive? That can solely mean, that the filesystem / filestructure is corrupt... can't it? I mean... in the end this should be what "rm -R *" does as well.... I know that it is possible to read data that has been deleted in that way. But I never heard of data that has come back to live unwanted... Shouldn't that then happen with regular filesystems in daily operation as well? Why doesn't deleted data show up in files I have on my /home-dir? I am frequently deleting, creating and changing data on there without doing low-level formats. But all the files ar OK. Regardless of whether another file has been written to that physical block or not. At least I never ever had any binary file showing up in a text file... Sorry, I just don't get it. Can you explain that effect in a short essay? ;-)
Installing to a 'dirty' partition can interfere with the installation itself *or not* and can cause unexplained configuration changes and 'creeping' filesystem corruptions to 'magically' appear. The procedure outlined above eliminates this problem. YMMV, of course (standard disclaimer!)
Well, given the effort of reinstalling, loading multimedia-addons and ATI drivers ... I am really considdering living with that system until 10.1 is finally available and then doing the upgrade in the right way. But I can tell you... it's not funny. Is this the same with ALL systems (Win, Linux (debian, ...), Mac...) or just a SUSE kind of problem? Kind regards, Martin