Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!cadre!pitt!amanue!oglvee!jr From: jr@oglvee.UUCP (Jim Rosenberg) Newsgroups: comp.unix.aux Subject: Re: Some notes on problems in A/UX Message-ID: <271@oglvee.UUCP> Date: 22 Aug 88 20:10:44 GMT References: <6836@well.UUCP> Organization: Oglevee Computer Systems, Connellsville, Pa Lines: 27 From article <6836@well.UUCP>, by pokey@well.UUCP (Jef Poskanzer): > When I was using pre-release A/UX, I would typically reboot once or twice > a day. fsck would find and fix a problem about on about half of these > reboots. Maybe once in two weeks, it would do a double reboot as you > describe above. And twice in N months, it went into continuous reboots. > fsck would claim to have fixed the problem, reboot, and then do exactly > the same thing again. When I showed this to a wizard he mumbled something > about fsck not flushing all its buffers -- sounds pretty dangerous to me! I probably shouldn't stick my nose into this, since I don't have a Mac II and don't run A/UX. But it seems to me that the better part of wisdom in dealing with fsck is to know how to boot a "lifeboat" UNIX system from a floppy, and fsck your "raw" hard disk root file system while it's *UNMOUNTED*. This would allow any number of passes through fsck without any auto reboots. Unfortunately, there are more versions of UNIX on personal computers than you can shake a stick at that *DON'T TELL YOU* how to create a bootable floppy. If your A/UX documentation doesn't tell you how to run fsck with your hard disk off-line when working with a bootable floppy, scream like hell. There are cases where booting the floppy is the only safe thing to do, unless you simply decide to bite the big one and restore the whole damn disk from floppies. -- Jim Rosenberg pitt Oglevee Computer Systems >--!amanue!oglvee!jr 151 Oglevee Lane cgh Connellsville, PA 15425 #include