Clutter Learns Linux

[Bruno]

Clutter . . . way to go ! Bruno

[Cluttermagnet]

Here is Clutter's 'Question of the Week':Is there anything in the Ubuntu/ Debian repositories that functions like Steve Gibson's "TIP" utility? TIP (Trouble in Paradise) is a Zip disk utility which will exercise a disk thoroughly and report any soft errors/ firm errors/ hard errors/ number of sectors taken out of service/ number of reserve sectors remaining, etc.I did a search using Synaptic, trying many different search terms. Nothing much found. Most of it seemed to relate to backup. My concern is how to periodically check disk health and drive health, etc.BTW I got lucky this week- a friend came across some 250M zip disks at a church rummage sale and bought a half dozen for me, real cheap. There were more, but he didn't snatch them all up. Too bad. They were gone the next day. But it's still a nice find. So far, I have only one 250M drive here. All my others are 100m. They are pretty cheap on Ebay, however. I will no doubt get a few more of the 250M drives eventually. (You can't use a 250M disk in a 100M drive, but the 100M disks will work fine in the 250M drives) Yes, Zip drives are obsolete/ dead, but they can be had quite cheaply (or free) and are still plentiful. Sometimes they are given away or thrown away. Zips are plenty good enough for me. I have always liked them. They are just a lot easier to work with than CDRW, DVDRW, etc. Yeah, I know- flash drives rule. But I just like the old Zips, slow though they are. And the drives make an interesting noise. Heh!

Edited October 19, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[Bruno]

Hi ClutterLinux does a few checks at boot on the paritions . . . . checks the superblock info and sees if it matches. Once in a X times boot it does a fsckNext to that you can check for bad-blocks with the badblocks command Finally there are the smartmontools ( http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6983 )There may be other tools to check HD health . . . . If I think of one I will add them to the thread . . . Maybe others can do the same :DB) Bruno

[Cluttermagnet]

Thanks, Bruno-Most of this does seem to be related to hard disk drives. Of course the OS treats a Zip drive like a hard drive, but I bet that mostly you see big differences in how the drives work internally (in terms of internal drivers and utilities). So I'm not at all sure that the smartmontools utility would apply. TIP is an example of one of those free Windows utilities that just works really well, has a great GUI, and is very intuitive and satisfying to use. I really doubt there is a good analog on the Linux side. No matter, as I can boot over into Windows to do this occasional job. This is not a high priority need, not at all. And after all, Zips are considered 'dead'. Unless there are existing utilities for them, I very much doubt whether any more tools are being written.BTW my Synaptic search did turn up one tool that was intriguing- some sort of a zip drive mounting and unmounting tool. I wonder what that one is? Maybe it makes that task easier than even writing simple bash scripts. Some of the later distros are simply finding the Zip drives- I think I saw Simply Mepis (or maybe PCLos?) do that. Hmmm, did I see a later Ubuntu also do that? Now I have to go back and check my Feisty install- and also look at how Gutsy behaves with Zips...

Edited October 19, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[striker]

I think Bruno summed them up already, all is left to tell is that Solid State Disks (SSD) are in the pipeline. Think of it as Flash drives known from memory sticks but packed in a 2,5" housing. They're fast as lightning, noiseless, and no moving parts inside. The price at this moment is the biggest problem, but when sold and used more and more the price will drop, and that will be the end of the conventional mechanical hard disk drive.

[Cluttermagnet]

...all is left to tell is that Solid State Disks (SSD) are in the pipeline....that will be the end of the conventional mechanical hard disk drive.

Yep. So true...And here I am playing with (removable media) obsolete hardware. But it's fun, and flash drives don't make that intriguing little whirring noise like Zip drives do... :whistling:That is just about my all time favorite 'computer noise', just so long as the drive does not have 'click death'. I have never personally heard that sound, but it was probably a part of what killed the Zip drive in the market. Too bad- they are charming little obsolete peripherals, and I still like them... Edited October 19, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[zlim]

We had two of those drives, an IOmega zip and a SuperDisk both connected to the pc by parallel port. We sold the zip before it got the click of death. We did get some freebies from IOmega because of some class action suit. My husband continued to use the superdisks because when you are creating college math tests with graphs, a floppy just doesn't cut it. The Superdisk drive slowed down his computer and every once in a while a disk would not eject. I don't remember what we did (it has been awhile). I know we didn't shut down until we were absolutely certain there was no read or write going on. We didn't want to trash all his files. We eventually either sold or gave that drive away and my hubby is using flash drives and regular floppies.

[Cluttermagnet]

Yup-I remember hearing about that class action suit, though not the details. I believe that the internal drives never did have any problems, but some of the external types did. Specifically which ones I don't remember. I do have an Iomega 100M USB type external drive. Never had any trouble with it. They were a lot faster than the parallel models, which I'd always avoid, personally. All my other drives are internal, and all but one are the 100M size. Never have seen any sign of a damaged drive or disk with 'click death', although that phenomenon was 'real' (though rare). I think Iomega ended up getting screwed over by outsourcing the building of the drives to a house in Asia that just wasn't up to the job.I'm surprised how many people who know about Zip drives apparently don't know about Gibson's neat little TIP utility. It's really slick, and after you run it a few times you quickly know your status, and you develop wonderful peace of mind about the state of your drives and media. But you do need to take a relook at your media from time to time. I have seen them deteriorate even in storage, starting out great but then developing problems later. Let's just say that Zips are probably not your top choice for archiving, but are great for moving medium size files around from machine to machine. I love 'em! And they are sure dirt cheap now, and they hold waaaay more than a floppy diskette.

[ross549]

I had an internal zip100 drive.... unfortunately, it developed the click of death. It went in the trash shortly thereafter.

[Cluttermagnet]

Too bad.Steve Gibson has an informative writeup on the phenomenon. Seems it is 'catching', i.e. a bad diskette can damage a previously good drive, then that now damaged drive can inflict further damage on more previously good media, etc. As I remember, it was almost always seen in some external drive types, rarely in the internal drives. He has some photos of a drive head which has been decapitated by a bad disk. BTW this was supposedly quite a rare occurrenceAlthough I've never personally seen or heard actual 'click death', I have heard the sound of head seeking as the drive attempts to read from bad sectors- and that sound is distressing enough to me. The actual click sound is the sound of the head 'parking' before it swings back out to try again at the bad sector. On a deteriorating disk (not with 'click death'), you hear a lot of head parking as the drive repeatedly marks sectors bad and allocates spare sectors in their place- thus, a lot of clicks. Some may have misinterpreted what they were hearing as 'click death' when in fact, it was not. Their loss, my gain, as this gear is real cheap now. And the little whirring sound the drives make is so cute. ;)Here's a quote from Gibson:

The clicking sound itself is nothing more than the sound of the heads being retracted from the cartridge into the drive then immediately reinserted. This deliberate strategy is employed by the drive when it is having trouble locating, reading, or writing any of the cartridge's data. This removal and reinsertion of the heads recalibrates the head positioning mechanism, "scrubs" the heads to remove excessive oxide deposits, and eliminates electrostatic charge build-up on the heads.It is VERY IMPORTANT for you to understand that the clicking sound itself is NOT the problem. The clicking is just an audible indication of a drive that is having trouble accessing the data on a cartridge.

OTOH if you start with all good drives and media, and always test when introducing any new drives or media, you will develop a strong 'sixth sense' about your Zip status. That little Gibson "TIP" utility, running under Windows, makes it easy to do that. I wish there were such a utility under Linux to exercise drives and media and to monitor their health.TIP is one of several examples of why I'll be keeping a couple of copies of Win98SE around. There are some things I've not yet learned to do under Linux, perhaps a few simply are not duplicated in Linux. Whenever I can find a replacement utility, that's another task I'll relearn under Linux. Some day I'll no longer need Windows at all. It'll just be a happy memory... Edited October 23, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[ross549]

There are various ways of doing it, but I don't think you are going to find any low level code (like what Steve writes) to do things like Spinrite does.I use several tools to monitor my PC's health.Firstly, to exercise the CPU and memory at full speed, I use CPUburn, which is on the Ultimate boot CD.Secondly, for the memory specifically, there is no better tool that i know of than memtest86. I use it both on UBCD and various LiveCDs. The Ubuntu disc (at least the new one) has the option to boot into memtest86 instead of linux.Thirdly, I use mke2fs to stresstest my drives. Now this is not a low-level disk checker, but a formatting tool that can have a three-pass data integrity check to be run when you format a partition or drive.The command I use is:

# mke2fs -c -c /dev/sdxx

This formats a partition ext2, and does a three-pass read/write test of that partition. Usually, I make one large partition on the drive with fdisk to run this test on the whole drive.That's about it I guess. :)Adam

[Cluttermagnet]

Thanks, Adam-Some great info on related PC health testing. I know about Memtest for RAM, and like that one a lot. I'll look into mke2fs and CPUburn, they both sound interesting. I guess TIP run in 98SE will stay the gold standard for me, for ZIP drive and media exercising/ health monitoring. It shows perhaps just a little bit of what SpinRite is all about, for Zip and Jazz media only.

[Cluttermagnet]

Not to be outdone by Eric and others, I fiddled with the partitions on the Cluttermaster 2007 and have messed up the Grub bootloader (or more likely the 'partition table'?), it looks like. Since I have a copy of Dapper on there, I may settle for just installing Feisty over it in the root partition. But OTOH it might be a good exercise to see if I can coax it back to life. I know the distro is intact, and I can even see the grub bootmenu by using the Super Grub bootable CD. But Dapper will no longer launch.What I did relates back to my original setup (about the 2nd or 3rd page in this thread). I had ended up (previously) with my root and home partitions in the 'middle' of the drive. I had an extended partition at the beginning of the drive- it had a FAT32 and a Linux swap partition in it. At the end of the drive, I had filled up all remaining space with another FAT32 partition after getting Dapper installed. Everything worked great, although I did not have any Windows OS on the drive. At least not one in bootable form, or one which I cared about. I think there actually was a copy of 98SE in that FAT32 within the extended partition, FWIW. Whatever- I wasn't using 98SE on that machine anyway, and I didn't care. Just a few days ago, I decided to reinstall 98SE on the Cluttermaster so I could run "TIP" to look at my 'new' (rummage sale) 250M Zip disks. This tower has my only 250M drive. Mission accomplished, I have a bootable copy of 98SE in the 'first' partition on the drive. So what I did was to fire up Dapper in Live CD session and run the gnome partition editor. I removed the 'outside' partitions from the HD, leaving only the root and home partitions in the middle. Then I rebuilt it, but in the 'opposite' manner, with a bootable FAT32 partition at the beginning, and an extended partition at the very end of the HD containing Linux swap and another FAT32. Obviously I have messed up the partition record now, and grub can't figure out which end is up and launch dapper. In retrospect, I could have just left all the old partitions alone and installed 98SE in the 'top' FAT32 space. Then the other FAT32 in the extended partition could have become a 'share' partition. Ah well, 20-20 hindsight... :whistling:I'm pretty sure this is a recoverable error, but if it's too much work to do that, it is easy enough to simply put Feisty over Dapper in my root partition and be done with it. I assume installing Feisty would take care of setting up grub once again in a working configuration?

Edited October 24, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[Urmas]

I assume installing Feisty would take care of setting up grub once again in a working configuration?

Yup... but in case you want to play a bit:1. Pop in the Live CD, boot from it until you reach the desktop.1½. Open Gparted and examine the current partition mess.2. Open a terminal window or switch to a tty.3. Type "grub"4. Type "root (hd0,6)", or whatever your harddisk + boot partition numbers are (for example, if /boot is at /dev/sda7, it translates to hd0,6 for grub).5. Type "setup (hd0)", ot whatever your harddisk # is.6. Quit grub by typing "quit".7. Reboot.

[Cluttermagnet]

Yup... but in case you want to play a bit:

Cool! Thanks, Urmas. I'll play with this a bit and let you know what develops.

[Cluttermagnet]

root(hd0,1)

returns: error 27 unrecognized command.Syntax?

root (hd0,1)

returns: error 21 selected disk does not existmy Linux root partition is at /dev/hda2

Edited October 24, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[Cluttermagnet]

OK, succeeded. All I had to realize is that I needed to be root:

sudo grub

I picked it up from here. Found that from a web search on "setup(hd0,1)".If anyone needs it, I wrote down the whole lengthy dialog exactly, but the grub shell looked for and found /grub/stage1 and 2 and /grub/e2fs_stage1_5It embedded 15 sectors (whatever that means) and then it installed /boot/grub/stage1 and 2. Then it announced "suceeded", "Done" etc. so I "quit"Now it does try to boot into Ubuntu Dapper but no grub menu appears first. So it looks like next I need to do that chainloader +1 thingie... :)Nope- waitaminnit, waitaminnit-I'm still at the same roadblock as before (if I used the Super Grub bootable CD:Now Dapper begins to boot, you get the splash acreen, but it progresses only up to "Loading essential drivers""Mounting root file system"...Just a little bit on the progress bar, then it just halts. :wacko:Meanwhile, for the moment, I also cannot access the newly installed 98SE in (hd0,0), either. :w00t:Hey, this is fun! Crash and burn...

Edited October 24, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[ross549]

OK, then you have to change your fstab, located at /etc/fstab. You are going to need to run ubuntu live, use gparted or something to see what your partition numbers are for your root filesystem. Then you'll have to modify the fstab with the new partition numbers.Adam

[Urmas]

HEY! EVERYBODY!Clutter's riding without training wheels!

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Hey Clutter,Do you officially hold the record for the thread with the most posts here at ATL? I thought one of my "Adventures With..." threads would achieve that infamy, but I must bow to the "Clutter Learns Linux" thread, I think.

[Cluttermagnet]

OK, then you have to change your fstab, located at /etc/fstab. You are going to need to run ubuntu live, use gparted or something to see what your partition numbers are for your root filesystem. Then you'll have to modify the fstab with the new partition numbers.

Yep, that sounds about right. I already have the Dapper CD in the drive. I'll take a look later this evening when I return, and write down the fstab table data. I already know all the partition numbers from having run gparted before. If it is obvious to me what is wrong with that table, I'll take a 'stab' at rewriting fstab. Heh!You sure it's that easy? I think even I can handle that.

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

(etc.)

HEY! EVERYBODY!Clutter's riding without training wheels!

(Humming to self:)"Dum de dum dum dum... Hey-I'm a big boy now. No training wheels.Look Ma! Look, Pa! No hands. I..."(CRASH!) Edited October 24, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[striker]

http://images1.comstock.com/Imagewarehouse...1499/KS1143.JPG

[Cluttermagnet]

Hey Clutter,Do you officially hold the record for the thread with the most posts here at ATL? I thought one of my "Adventures With..." threads would achieve that infamy, but I must bow to the "Clutter Learns Linux" thread, I think.

Clutter is rarely acused of being short- winded. I think I was hard- wired at birth in 'verbose' mode. :hysterical:No, actually, the title for "Longest Thread" is held by all who participate in that "three words" thingie.Pretty ironical and paradoxical, don't you think? Bunch of real short- winded people in there...

this thread has more posts than all but the top 20 or so posters.

This thread has more posts than a dog has fleas? Many years from now, archaeologists and anthropologists will study the Clutter thread, parsing it for finer nuances of meaning. Humanity's great turnaround will date from this era- when humans gave up polluting and wars, pantomine, mime, and unicycles; global warming reversed itself, etc. Edited October 26, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[ross549]

I think the three word story thread in the WC still has more posts...... 3,100......:PAdam

[boilertech]

Only 92 posts (91 counting mine) left before it hits 1000.

[Cluttermagnet]

OK-I took the time to add in a number of entries (lines) in fstab, and the new data saved fine. Since I did this under

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

I am assuming I actually changed fstab in the installed Dapper distro (?) Anyway, still the same problem, boots briefly, then hangs at "mounting the root file system". Perhaps I should post a copy of what was (and what is now) in fstab? I'm confused BTW because there is a "unionfs" line and a "tmpfs" line in fstab. I have not come across these in the past when looking at fstab tables.First, here are the original entries (lines) found:

unionfs / unionfs rw 0 0tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0/des/hda5 swap swap defaults 00

Here are the lines I added (I removed none so far):

/dev/hda1 /Win98SE vfat defaults,utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1/dev/hda2 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1/dev/hda3 /home ext3 defaults 0 2/dev/hda6 none vfat defaults,utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1

OK, I'm maybe starting to get it. I just rebooted into a Dapper live CD session and when I do

gedit /etc/fstab

I get only the original three line items. So obviously, last time, I must have edited fstab in the live session and not in the installed distro (?)So how do I go about editing the installed fstab? Or is that what I did indeed do? And if so, why didn't the changes 'stick'? They appeared to at the time I did the edit. :w00t:BTW I'm betting that I need to remove the first 2 of the 3 original lines above, 'unionfs' and 'tmpfs'. But again, what am I looking at? The installed distro, or just the fstab in a live CD?

Edited October 25, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[V.T. Eric Layton]

To edit the installed fstab, Clutter, you'll need to mount the partition where it's located, then edit and save.

[Cluttermagnet]

To edit the installed fstab, Clutter, you'll need to mount the partition where it's located, then edit and save.

Yep-I had one of those "d'oh!", forehead- slapping, Homer Simpson sort of moments a while back, when I realized that. Heh! I'll take another stab at it later this evening. Thanks for the hint. :whistling:Well, I learned that a live CD session of Ubuntu has a weird- looking fstab table. Makes sense, though, eh? Temp files and such? One thing that fooled me- the live session is smart enough to find and use the hda5 Linux swap partition I have on that drive. Imagine that! ;) Edited October 25, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[Cluttermagnet]

OK, I'm going to need help...The live CD session can't find /dev/hda2, my root partition, in its fstab. Therefore, all is impossible. Of course, I could care less about its fstab. I want to get at the installed fstab so I can look at it and change it. Please enlighten me. :wacko:BTW finding myself near clueless, I did at least attempt to make sense of it using

man mount

I'm still as confused as ever after scrolling through there. Oh, I understood a lot of what I was seeing there, but not how it applies when in live CD session.So far, Terminal commands have not helped- yet I believe that is the only way 'in'. Nautilus has not been helpful in this case, it complains it can't pmount /dev/hda2 because it is not a removable medium. Gee, thanks. Well, that is true, of course- my hard drive isn't removable media.

Edited October 26, 2007 by Cluttermagnet

[Cluttermagnet]

Anyone?