grist for the installfest mill

[ME]

I'll take a stab at some of these q's, anyone else, please feel free to
make other suggestions...

On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Brian Lintz wrote:
[chop]
>     My partition for linux is 400 MB. [Aside: Can someone
> please explain why fdisk and NT both say that it is 400 MB
> and both install programs for linux (Caldera and Storm) show
> 399 MB?

Probably a rounding issue, or a computational issue. Some apps may
compute 1k to be exactly 1000 bytes, while other compute 1 k to be 1024
bytes. And others may computer 1 Megabyte to be 1,000,000 bytes while
others may computers it to be 1000, k (where k may be 1024 bytes or 1000
bytes) and yet others may computer 1Megabyte as 1024*1024 bytes (1048576)

In increments near 400Mb, problems with the 1k=1024 vs 1000 and 1M =
1000*1000, or 1024*1000, or 1024*1024 are not the likely culprits to your
1Mb issue, but the numbers used may be computed with division included at
some point ond one may round up while the other and round down and their
rounding points may be different.

If they were taking into consideration the amount of space used by the
filesystem overhead, it would likely be much more than 1Mb, so the above
rounding suggestion seems likely.

> Is the "loss" of 1 MB really lost or of any signi-
> ficance?]

I dont think the Mb is lost, but just computed differently. Try to compute
it on your own by looking at the bytes per cyl * number of cyls to see if
you can see how close to 399 vx 400 Mb the actual value is.

> Restarting the computer a
> minute later I saw that the computer now could not finish
> the POST: I read the dismaying message "Primary hard disk
> failure." I thought that things looked bad for the hometeam.

>     I had decided to take this as a project to the NBLUG
> installfest. [BTW, seeing how it is October, could we
> combine some aspects of Octoberfest with the installfest?]

Italian, Mountain Mike's Pizza seems germanic, eh? Isn't Oktoberfest in
Septemmber?

>     Can someone please explain why a hard disk drive
> may at one moment not be found after POST and then
> twenty-four hours later is found by POST and is well?

I can't know for certain why you experienced this problem, but here are
some reasonable thoughts:

During the installation, your HD over-heated and caused components on the
drive to fail to work within parameters expected by the ATA/IDE interface
(sending no signals, bad signals, poor signals, bad power, etc.)

Your HD is on the way to final failure, and is having problems staying
spun-up. bearing/spindle/drive shaft could be starting to drag too much to
allow the motor to spin up the drive when the motor was warm.

Motor failure for the drive is going to become a problem, or was just a
problem for a brief time.

Choices (as I see 'em) heat, power, signal, mechanical failure, (all
pointig to the chance that it will happen again and this is just a bad
omen.) or perhaps just a fluke event that will not repeat itself.

(I am ssuming you did not losen/tighten your cables between the time it
failed and started work, did not add or remove any drives, hw devices, etc
as there are other things that could case this if you were trying to make
this error appear. ]:> )

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

-ME


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