Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

James suggests our computer with a hard disk problem was at the curb 
because of the bad hard disk.


It was on the curb for at least two other reasons:
1.  CD/RW drive won't play music properly (skips and stops) but it does 
fine with reading and writing data files.
2.  Video card was not working except as plain VGA (it was some new thing 
with LOTS of RAM).  We took it out and used the onboard video 
instead.  (The AGP SiS which I could not get to work in 16bit color).
3.  The floppy drive was missing, along with its cage.  They left the 8G 
hard drive in there dangling. Had to make a new cage for both.  

The hard drive is also acting slow during linux boot. I just compared it 
on the older linux computer.  This slow one takes 10 sec or so to look at 
the hard drive near the end of boot (mount in read/write).  It is 
tolerable, considering this is our giant 8G hard drive and our fastest 
computer (500MHz) with all three OS'es on it so we can learn to write CDs 
three ways.  

Maybe something is wrong with the timing and DOS and Windows don't care 
but linux does?


On Sun, 28 Dec 2003, James Miller wrote:

> On Sun, 28 Dec 2003, Sindi Keesan wrote:
> 
.....
> Well, it does sound like it could be a hard drive problem to me.  Maybe
> that's why it was on the curb?
> 

We have DOS scandisk (8.3 filenames only) and Windows scandisk, neither of 
which works with linux partitions.  Maybe the linux partition has some bad 
sectors?

> I've had hard drives that give problems in Win work ok with Linux and vice
> versa.  What exactly does scandisk do?  Can it check a disk independently
> of what file system is on it?  If not, then ef2sck might be what you're
> looking for: it checks ext2 file systems for errors.  The only hard disk
> integrity-checking product I know of that works independently of file
> systems is Spinrite.  But it's not open source and costs a fair amount
> ($90?).  I've heard someone knowledgeable about it claim it was worth the
> price.

I think ef2sck runs automatically if you turn off linux without exiting 
properly, or it crashes.  Scandisk checks the actual physical disk for bad 
sectors as well as checking file systems.  We probably did this before 
formatting.

We will continue to use this 8G drive and expect it to be slow on searches 
because it resets up to 3 times on each search.
 
> > Do you happen to know how to set up DOS autoexec.bat and config.sys for a
> > CD/RW drive (with aspi.sys)?
> >
> I know nothing about this - sorry.

We made some guesses and will test them and report back.  You only need 
ONE mscdex line for two CD-drives.  We have aspi.sys on one line in 
config.sys and it thinks there are 2 drives.  Only one of ours is RW.

> 
> James
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