On 4/4/07, Micah DesJardins wrote: > I'm glad you're back up and running. Any idea what the problem > was? I'm curious. The problem is by no means solved completely, but I'm back up. The internal SATA drive worked the first time it was accessed from Knoppix. Then it behaved intermittently. Jiggling the cable sometimes worked, but not reliably, and may have had nothing to do with it. The USB on the motherboard was working fine. I don't know why I was unable to use it all this time. It works now, and I also have my new PCI USB card in, and it sees all eight ports. (That should cover the two devices I have to put on it!) We put stuff on both the internal and external USB and it sees them fine. I have not been able to do a complete backup since September 12th, nearest I can tell. There are other problems. Unfortunately, I installed both my main system and my external drive with reiser file systems, not knowing how prone to bugs these were, being of the misinformed impression that reiserfs was state of the art. Big mistake. *Very* big mistake. I *still* have not been able to complete a backup, and have had to reboot three times since last night. The first and third time I got syslog messages popping up that were thoroughly laced with the word "reiser", and the drives hung. The second time I tried to umount my automounting external drive, but it couldn't because of resources that owned it. I tried logging off completely, logging onto the console as root, and found there were still two processes alive that had my loginname attached to them. When I tried to kill them, the system paniced, and the dump that appeared also said "reiser" in numerous lines. This morning I tried a backup again, figuring that eventually it should get to the end since I'm using cpio -pdm, which will skip files that are already out there. But again I got the pop-up syslog messages. Then made the mistake of running sync, which has been running since about 5:30am. I don't want to kill it or any parent process right now because I'm sure it will trigger another panic. Why this situation has suddenly reared its head after nearly two years of flawless operation I don't know, but I tend to think it's got to be hardware, which wears out, because I don't monkey much (at all) with the system software. So I'm not out of the water yet. The ideal solution is going to be to rebuild my system softwarewise and move quickly away from using reiserfs, which will require me to get at least one more disk drive. In addition, I discovered a case fan has gone bad. (Not the one that surrounds the CPU.) Gotta fix that before hot weather comes for sure. It gets close to 90 degrees in my office in the afternoons, and there's not a thing I can do about it. (Except take my new laptop and work in the living room where it's at least 10 degrees cooler.) As if I've got nothing but time to rebuild systems. I know that for some subscribers on this list that's what they do and love. I did it myself for decades, when I got paid to crash systms daily, but I'm over it. I love Linux as a work environment, and just want stable systems that work and that I don't have to rebuild very often. I'm presently planning on rebuilding on SuSE 10.2. I know, someone will say that I should use Ubuntu because it's Debian based and therefore a lot easier to keep up to date. But I've never actually seen it, and I've really *loved* SuSE 9.2 the last two years. I'll probably run Ubuntu under VMware on my Macbook Pro. You asked, now you know. -- Lynn David Newton Phoenix, Arizona --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss