On Friday 27 October 2006 18:45, LDB wrote:

I recently had my SuSE 10.0 installation have its root partition go into read-only mode - It was proposed that my disk is going bad. I rebooted and everything is fine after the reboot.

No, nothing changed. It just suddenly went into read-only mode.

Any ideas?

Hi LDB, Spontaneously dropping into read-only ("dirty") mode is a sign of a failed hard disk read or write operation. You were forced to reboot which, in turn, caused the appropriate flavor of 'fsck' to be run automatically on the unmounted partition. Apparently, the filesystem was successfully "cleaned" and put back into service, but you'll be a much happier camper if you take preemptive measures, now, instead of waiting for this 'transient' problem to reappear. In my experience, the frequency and severity of 'transient' drive errors only increases over time... sometimes failures happen very soon and are severe... other times you can 'stumble along' for several weeks or even months. One thing you *can* be sure of, though, is *transient* errors and hard disks are *not* a good mix. :-) I'd check to see if a bootable floppy or CD-ROM based diagnostic utility is available at the drive manufacturer's website. If S.M.A.R.T. is supported and enabled, this may tell you more about the problem. I'd also make timely backups of any data and configuration files, just in case. hth & regards, Carl

LDB wrote:

Carl Hartung wrote:

...

On Friday 27 October 2006 18:45, LDB wrote:

...

I recently had my SuSE 10.0 installation have its root partition go into read-only mode - It was proposed that my disk is going bad. I rebooted and everything is fine after the reboot.

No, nothing changed. It just suddenly went into read-only mode.

Any ideas?

Hi LDB,

Spontaneously dropping into read-only ("dirty") mode is a sign of a failed hard disk read or write operation. You were forced to reboot which, in turn, caused the appropriate flavor of 'fsck' to be run automatically on the unmounted partition. Apparently, the filesystem was successfully "cleaned" and put back into service, but you'll be a much happier camper if you take preemptive measures, now, instead of waiting for this 'transient' problem to reappear.

In my experience, the frequency and severity of 'transient' drive errors only increases over time... sometimes failures happen very soon and are severe... other times you can 'stumble along' for several weeks or even months. One thing you *can* be sure of, though, is *transient* errors and hard disks are *not* a good mix. :-)

I'd check to see if a bootable floppy or CD-ROM based diagnostic utility is available at the drive manufacturer's website. If S.M.A.R.T. is supported and enabled, this may tell you more about the problem. I'd also make timely backups of any data and configuration files, just in case.

hth & regards,

Carl

Thanks guys ... :)

LDB

If I may keep this alive a little longer .... I have used dd to copy from the bad disk to the other disk in the enclosure. The bad disk is in a VG (/dev/sda). The new disk is actually (/dev/sdb) I have changed /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/grub.conf to reflect the new /dev/sdb. I am also going to change ALL references from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb in the directories/files in /etc/lvm/* Am I covering everything? Thanks, LDB

Carl Hartung wrote:

On Wednesday 01 November 2006 21:11, LDB wrote:

...

I have used dd to copy from the bad disk to the other disk in the enclosure. The bad disk is in a VG (/dev/sda). The new disk is actually (/dev/sdb)

I have changed /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/grub.conf to reflect the new /dev/sdb. I am also going to change ALL references from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb in the directories/files in /etc/lvm/*

Am I covering everything?

Is there a reason why you're not pulling the original drive out and moving the replacement into it's slot? I'd have thought you could avoid changing any config files by doing this.

Carl

True .. but I might not have that option if the local guy cannot physically do it for me. :) I am preparing for the worst . .:)) LDB