So I have checked this Maxtor drive using all the Maxtor utilities, and the drive seems to pass every one of their tests… I still don’t trust it, mainly since the S.M.A.R.T. feature reports 3925 write errors… And the loss of data I experienced not too long ago…

Anyhoo, I however decided to use it in my RAID 5 array. If the drive does go bad, it will be an easy matter of going to the local computer store, and picking up another 250 gig drive to replace it. With that in mind, I splurged yesterday on 2 removable HD bays (at $14.99 each).

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Finally, everything is workning!

RAID array is working well, serving data through NFS and Samba, music server is putting out tunes through all the speakers, and the torrents are flowing… There’s more I want to do, but I’m happy for now.

I can rest, and get on with other things. I must admit, I’ve been a little obsessed about getting this linux server up and running. Make a backup this morning, and scheduled the system to make system backups every morning. Just in case.

This has happened every time I install SuSE… I get everything working, and the sound is still flaky. Every time.
Now it’s on the server. To get SoftSqueeze working, I need to have access to the sound card, which currently I do not. The root user seems to have control, since I can send a ‘play’ command as root, and tunes comes out, however as a regulas user. Nada.
I had already copied the asound.conf file (mentioned in an earlier post) to the /etc folder.
And I get some error message. Gonna persue the permissions…
Got it. Looked at the permissions for /dev/dsp and it belonged to user root and group audio.
Made the user (myself) part of the audio group, rebooted, and all is well.

On Friday, the Maxtor 250Gig gave up the ghost… well actually I got fed up with it. The drive still runs, but had quite a few errors on it.

After spending pretty much all weekend trying to recover the data, all I have to show for it is just a directory listing of what used to be on the drive. All the data got scrambled. ALL of it. That was about 250 gigs of mainly movies, videos, all my mp3 music and all my pictures.

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Just playing with LVM, and it looks like it’s what I’ve been looking for in order to merge lots of drives together. I especially like the fact that I can remove a drive from the equation. Anyway, here are a few good sites I’ll have to re-read on how to manage an LVM file system.
Link 1 – Shrink an LVM volume
Link 3

One other thing I found is that in order to resize a volume, I need to unmount it first. That can be done just by selecting “_blank_” from the mount point drop down menu. Hit apply, and then go about the operation. When done resizing, re-mount it.
Do everything in the LVM menu is yast. Don’t go into the Partitioner option, since I kept getting error when trying certain operations on the LVM volumes.
And it seems that if a physical volume is removed (becuase let’s say it’s corrupt) I cannot rebuild the remainig data. I only tried with 3 partitions, and removed the middle one, but with no positive results with reiserfs.

One note: XFS can be expanded (grown) but it cannot be shrunk. ReiserFS can do both.

On the weekend I decided to remove the WinServer 2003 from the equation (acting as a file server on a 400Mhz P3), and move the drives to the SuSE server, as well as use a bigger case to hold everything.
So I move all the bits to the other bigger case, add the DMA100/133 IDE controller with the two 250Gig drives, and boot it up. All works well, expect that I keep noticing that after a few reboots, I get a lot of file system rebuilds on the root partition. After a few more reboots, the Reiserfs has taken enough of a beating that it stops half way through tie startup phase.
So I do a repair off the SuSE setup disks, and try again (hoping that it was just a software problem). Nope. Still does it.
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Two things: Cedega and VMWare
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You know how once you solve a computer (or any other type of) problem, you tell yourself that you’ll never forget how to solve it if it happens again, since you just wasted 27 hours of your life figuring out the solution?
And what happend next month after you’ve had to deal with a dozen other issues, and same problem comes up again? Yes, you end up spending 22 hours (because you remembered 5% of the original solution)…
Anyhoo, I’m vowing not to make that mistake again. And since I’ve had to re-install SuSE several times since I started donw this linux road, I’m going to try to make this blog a record of the issues I’ve come across, and how I resolved them. Because _I’m 100% SURE_ it will come in handy again.
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