[ltp] Re: T60p + FireGL + Atheros Wireless Hardy Upgraded Failure

[Daniel Pittman]

Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org> writes:

> I need to do a fresh install of Hardy.  Anyone done this lately with
> this machine?
>
> What I need pointers with is mostly how to best setup the wireless
> and video.  I assume I'll just fetch the ATI driver from the ATI site.

No, use the "restricted drivers" support provided by Ubuntu, which will
install the packaged and compatible drivers for you.  That will save you
a world of pain.

Likewise, wireless, I advise the upstream setup: their drivers, possible
with the "linux-backports-modules" package as well[1], and NetworkManager.
(Unless it fails to work for you, of course. :)

[...]

> Any reason not to use xfs instead of ext3?  IIRC, xfs doesn't require
> fsck to run (fsck always seems to run when I need the laptop to start
> *fast*, of course).

ext3 doesn't need an fsck run either; the developers and distributions
use it because it will catch file system corruption earlier than XFS;
given the general reliability of PC hardware[2] this is probably a good
investment of time.

However, if you really don't want to run it you can use tune2fs(8) to
set the mount count and time for forced fsck to zero.[3]

Since you are running Hardy there really isn't much other consideration
for XFS -- though it may need tuning to obtain the best performance,
while ext3 will "just work" out of the box.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.xfs.general/21239/focus=21240

[...]

> The only package not to install was tzdata.  Didn't seem critical.  So
> rebooted.  fsck ran and reported many bad blocks.  Very odd that I get
> that right after running the upgrade.

That is odd, and suggests you may have had latent corruption.  When you
ran the fsck before the upgrade did you use '-f' to force a check?

If not it will have looked at the superblock, found that it was marked
clean, and just assumed the rest of it was fine.

[...]

> So, seems pretty hosed.

If you can afford to do so then a clean install will be the fastest path
to a working system, yes.  Otherwise it may be possible to recover, just
hard.

Regards,
        Daniel

Make sure you keep an up-to-date backup of your data, though, just in
case it is a hardware fault.

Footnotes: 
[1]  It have me a wireless LED with the iwl4965 under 2.6.24.

[2]  That is, fairly low, especially disk storage that gets bounced
     about like a laptop hard disk.

[3]  fsck is still run at boot, but only replays the journal, so
     shouldn't bother you -- it is no different to XFS in that regard.