Debian Hardware :: Can Hdparm's Readahead Setting Mess Up IDE Hard Drive?
Sep 10, 2011
On a Powerbook G4, I set hdparm to set the filesystem readahead (-a) to the maximum 2048 on boot. This produces a visible increase in performance... But today the hard drive started acting up - first generating I/O errors when trying to access various system binaries, and the second time bringing the desktop to a standstill and emitting loud clunking noises.In both cases the drive worked normally after a reboot... Even so, these are not what I'd consider good signs. However, the computer was working perfectly up until now, so I'm wondering if my tweaking was responsible. Can overly aggressive filesystem readahead settings damage an IDE hard drive?
I am running Xebian on my old Xbox. Currently I am trying to fit an old hdd that is locked (to a mo-bo that has expired). I have connected it up instead of the dvd drive and booted with it as slave. The OS can access it using hdparm -I /dev/hdb, but it showing as locked I have the key which is:
I am trying to input this using hdparm I have tried:
hdparm --security-mode U --security-unlock 761dd32be9df1796643b5c5fd995ba4e74f5e50e000000000000000000000000 /dev/hdb
which doesn't work. What format does the password need to be in. I suspect ASCII but I can't type some of the characters. Is the rest of the syntax correct? EDIT I have another key:
XboxHDKey d0 f3 f9 9a 03 20 41 b7 a4 70 bd eb 1b b3 cc ac
I already have windows installed and running on my computer. Right now there are two drives in it main program drive and a data drive. I want to setup a new physical drive that is soley for ubuntu. Do I format the drive in windows first or not?
I have created usb stick from which I install fedora. The bootloader is on the MBR of the usb stick and I want to put it onto the harddrive.I have tried running grub and setting up the MBR on the hard drive, but attemts to load the kernel fail with "Error 15: File not found".
I am running Linux Mint on my primary hard drive, and I would like to access some folders I have on my second hard drive, which has Windows XP installed on it. However, whenever I try to use these folders, I am greeted with the error message, "The file is not marked as executable." While I know how to set files as executable whenever I am using folders on my Linux drive, whenever I try to set such permissions on my XP folders, I can't seem to make it work. The files revert to their former status, and I'm told that I don't have permission. Should I set the files as sharable from within XP, so that they aren't marked as read-only? Or is there another solution I've missed?
Basically I want a shared hard drive plugged into my wireless router and for the family (me and my girlfriend until the little one grows up) to be able to access common files on the same external without the desktop needing to be on.
How to do this?
Do I just use any external? Does it have to have its own power source if plugged into a router? If I have a networking router how do I access those neat features that seem to be written for WIndows?
There are too many things I like about Ubuntu to go back to Windows, but I would like some tips on having a shared external hard drive via the wireless router instead of dropping money on a new bluetooth enabled router.
Basically I got Windows 7 installed on my laptop and it's been doing nothing but slowing down more and more even though it isn't used for much more than basic internet use and I realized the hard drive was the cause, I did a bunch of stuff to try to fix it that I won't get into here, and in basic I'm to the point I'm just going to reinstall Windows 7, but this time with the help of Ubuntu's partitioning utilities.
I've already had the first ~5GB of the drive overwritten with zero's (thanks to DBAN) and now I'm booted on the Ubuntu LiveCD and trying to learn the command line stuff for formatting a drive. What I want to achieve is use the smallest amount of space possible for the MBR and that's also a point I don't quite understand. After some research on Google I read that the MBR is on one sector only the very first one, yet the first partition on a hard drive starts anywhere from 63 to 4096. Why are they so far apart? And can I force the partition to be moved closer? I know I know their is pretty much no purpose to this but it bugs me knowing that their might be 31MB (64 512byte sectors minus 1 (MBR) and 64 (beginning of partition)) just going to waste when I could put the NTFS MFT there. Then the second and last part I want to understand is I want to make the NTFS partition have a 512byte allocation unit size and have it lined with the 512sectors on the hard drive so it can have the max performance. Does anyone know how to do this stuff or could find better info than I have on the internet?
I'm testing OpenSUSE 11.3 on a server and I'd like to disable the write cache on all of my drives. In Ubuntu Server I was able to accomplish this with hdparm by adding the appropriate settings to /etc/hdparm.conf
As far as I can find the only thing that OpenSUSE offers is /etc/sysconfig/ide which allows you to force particular DMA modes. I could just put the hdparm commands in /etc/init.d/boot.local but I'd prefer to do it the right way if there is a right way to do this in OpenSUSE.
I got a dell inspiron 1501 laptop with a 80Gb sata drive what is the best solution to add data storage space for someone that love to have multiples operating systems at hand Note: I use mostly linux so I won't need to change my laptop for many years maybe ...
Finally ran the upgrade from lenny to squeeze and ran into a few issues. I have to admit this is the first dist-upgrade I've ever had go this badly (kernel issues, xorg issues, mysql transition problems, mythtv... Yikes!).Anyway, the first problem I'm trying to fix is getting dpkg to like the new squeeze kernel. Here's the errors
Code: Errors were encountered while processing: linux-image-2.6.32-5-686
My parents bought a new hard drive for a laptop that I've owned for several years. It's much larger than the current one, so I plan on splitting it up to dual boot it with Ubuntu.I have no problem with partitioning a drive (I always keep a LiveCD handy), but my question is this: how can I go about moving the existing partition to the new drive? This is a laptop, so I can't simply plug the new drive into another slot.
Also, even if I manage to move it, will Windows still work on the new drive in a larger partition? I've had this laptop for quite a while, and I've lost the recovery discs that came with it a long time ago. I also have a lot of software without CDs to reinstall them with. This makes not reinstalling Windows a high priority.
Debian and debian based distros issue has a issue that has come to make it self aware to me when I was trying to burn a video on my hard drive with braseo and it won't let me burn more than 4.4 gigs to a dvd with 4.7 gigs of free space even a file that is over the 4.4 gig limit by a megabyte with windows i didn't have this problem. One more thing I have 16 gig flash drive and on debian and debian based distros i can only use 13.1 gigs of it but on fedora I can use all 16 gigs.
I have pen-drive and hexEditor, I made my very simple boot sector and I want to boot it from pendrive. Firstly I have to format it, is setting all bits to 0 on pendrive dangerous? or are there any bits that are reserved and I should not touch them?
Trying to install Fedora 12 using the 6 CDs. Trying to install on an older x86 box.Problem is that when detecting my hard drive, Fedora 12 recognizes it as a sda hard drive instead of hda hard drive. I have no SCSI connected to my computer what so ever. It's an old fashion PATA Western Digital hard drive.If I proceed with the install, Fedora 12 only installs 200MB of the OS from the first CD only. No options for additional software or anything.
How much should I consider allocating if I wanted to go a bit beyond a "Live CD" experience but not quite as far as making it my A-1 Linux? My first experience with Linux (or Unix) and GUI together was LinuxPPC on a 603e Mac clone. That was on an 8GB drive (that used to call a RAID server its home, incidentally). Then I had OS X, versions 10.1 and 10.2 on a G3 iMac (40GB boot drive), followed by OS X 10.3 Jaguar on a G4 Dual 1.25 MDD. The power supply died on that -- a $300 item when you can find one with the right pinouts.
In x86 land, on this Lenovo M55p (80gb boot, 1GB RAM, Windows XP Pro SP3 as the primary installed OS), I've sampled GNOME and KDE thanks to Wubi installs that were 15Gb and 25Gb, respectively. I also have an IBM Thinkpad T54 (1.25GB RAM, also 80GB boot) onto which I've installed Ubuntu 9.04.
I understand that Debian has no Wubi counterpart; that it runs strictly on X-ready file systems (Ext2, Ext3 come to mind as examples with which I am vaguely familiar). I have also heard, often enough to start believing it, that Ubuntu and its K & X variants are derived from Debian. I get the impression, however, that for a decent install of it, somewhat more than 15 or 25 GB may be required.
I have just set up a high available San with 2 nodes which run on debian 7.
Replication and high disponibility works fine but i have some problem with iscsi.
I have create on 2 windows server 2012 1 iscsi iniator on each, my problem is when i create a file or a directory on one server, I have to put the hard drive offline then online and the change appear but it's not really useful.
So i would like to know if there is a way to automatically do this.
I have a new install of debian on my laptop. When I plug in my external hard drive (usb) I get the message. Invalid mount option when attempting to mount the volume 'External Drive'.
Trying to go through some old hard drives I'd saved from a Mac we tossed years ago. Using a Sabrent USB adapter (USB-DSC9) I connected it to the Debian box and it mounts as /media. Here's the weird thing: although I can read all the random stuff, the directory with all my actual documents shows up as "you do not have the permissions necessary to view the contents". When I try to fix this with chmod, it tells me that the drive is read-only. Grr.
How do I mount the drive so that it's not read-only?
I notice a bunch of weird what appear to be hard drive related error messages on my Linux server:
May 16 19:07:38 ghost kernel: [ 3495.452698] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/33 May 16 19:07:38 ghost kernel: [ 3495.452706] ata3: EH complete May 16 19:07:40 ghost kernel: [ 3497.380640] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/33
[code]....
I don't know if this could be an indication that my hard drive(s) are about to fail. Can someone tell me if there's a way to test the drives or understand what's causing this error?
I have a 500 GB drive that has a bad "place" at the beginning of the drive. It affected both the MBR and the first 40 GB partition. I just installed a 1 TB (why not?) replacement, but I'm wondering if I can get some future use from the bad drive.
I recall there are programs that will identify and lock out bad sectors on a drive, but I can't remember any specific names. Does Linux have such a critter? Is the MBR in a fixed location on a drive, or could such a utility lock out the bad MBR and allow the creation of a new one in good space?
installed debian yesterday my problem is when running debian lenny on a gateway t1628 laptop, my computers hard drive is always spinning when running debian andt caused the computer to over heat and shut down automaticly.At least I think its the hard drive. when I use vista I don't have this problem. It has over heated a few times but I was running a lot of processes and had the hard drive loaded with a bunch of resource hogging programs.I'm running the amd64 architecture. I also haven't been able to configure the network yet. I had problems with that on the install but I need to take one problem at a time and being able to run for extended periods of time is first and formost.
If this has been covered before I couldn't find it.
What I'm "Not" Asking... I'm not asking about installing the CD image to a USB hard drive to boot a live install version. I've done that to see is my computer will boot from the USB and it does.
What I want to do is this:
An actual hard disk install of full featured Linux to a portable USB Hard Drive. I want to be able to plug in the USB HHD and go Linux. (Why you might ask? Fair enough. The laptop is my wife's computer and she says absolutely no to Linux.
i just burnt a debian lenny 504 live disk. i don't think there's a way to install it to hard drive. i just did a google search and it appears that the latest debian lenny 504 cannot be installed to hard drive with the live cd. from what i have read, i need to get a "netinstall" iso (this is new territory for me). can anyone supply me with a link for an iso with a hash verification? i would be most grateful. the disk i had previously must be corrupted because the install quits at 5%.
