So my laptop is running Fedora BloatCore 4, and last night I'm thinking: Hey, I haven't run up2date in a while..., So I run it and there's a handful of package upgrades to do, no big deal, select all, let 'er rip.

For some reason the MySQL package was corrupt, meh, I skipped it, deleted it from /var/spool/up2date, rebooted and started it over again.

After the reboot, the system was dead slow. I wondered, what happened?! I managed to polish off the rest of the updates, verry slooowwly. Videos and Mp3's were cutting out every time there was disk access. Craziness!

I tried to untar a 30MB source package I needed... 30 minutes later it still wasn't done. I figure, I don't need it that bad, and I cancel it.... this is when things started going wrong...

Something about cancelling that untar caused the entire filesystem to go read-only. Dialog boxes warning me that things couldn't save were popping up everywhere. So I thought, ok, let's restart this thing again and I'll run fsck against the drive.

Shutdown was a mess... errors everywhere.
Rebooted, fsck popped up immediately and started checking /dev/hda... half-way through: INCONSISTENCY ERROR! It crapped out and went to some diagnostic mode.

I ran fsck again... TONS of inode and block size errors... The idea that the new kernel is doing this started popping into my head... because I never USED to have a /dev/hda... it was always /dev/sda. fsck completes and I reboot... seems normal enough, get to the desktop, though things are still dog slow.

I check out my /boot and see 2.6.13 sitting there happily. I read somewhere online that adding hda=noprobe to your kernel parameters solves the disk access issue. Did that, restarted again.

KERNEL PANIC at boot.

So I restarted AGAIN, selected 2.6.12, removed 2.6.13 from my boot list, and all is well with my laptop once again.

Hooray for Linux :/

> because I never USED to have a /dev/hda... it was always /dev/sda.

SATA drive?

indeed
for some reason, 2.6.13 felt the need to make it ambiguous

it is your fault.

linux is infallible.

only tards have problems with linux.

kneel before linus!

make an altar to ESR

then, maybe, you will be forgiven.

o rly?

How about this? I have an eMachines M6805. You know my distro is Fedora Core 4, you know the Kernel I'm having trouble with is 2.6.13.

Tell me exactly what I should do to solve the disk access issues.

then, maybe, I will increase my regard for you from troll to slightly respected.

mmkay?

*Feels the need to interject with*

You wouldn't have this problem if you used Microsoft Windows XP

(for the record, I use all 3 OS's (Mac OS X, Win XP Home Edition, and Linux Kernel 2.6.12, after hearing this .13 problem Im a little wary of it)

/me is currently running 2.6.13 w/ no problems. But I have no SATA drives.

/me takes a big pad of red ink and stamps "FLAME BAIT" all over Pyroman's post.

.13's working fine here. I think. No, wait, I haven't rebooted yet, so it's still .12 (31 days uptime! w00t!)

tkjode:

Zeroth of all you should scour the internet for people with similar problems. Google for things like Kernel Panic and 2.6.13. Also emachines and fedora and so forth. groups.google.com, also many of the linux mailing lists, and so forth. This may take a few hours.

If that comes up nothing, then figure out which driver it is using for your hard disk. Why is it switching from /dev/sda to /dev/hda. Is redhat reconfiguring somehow the drivers it uses? Is it doing some sort of alternate startup routine from normal? Is it just redhat?

Or is the kernel really hosed and cant deal with your hardware anymore? If you decide its the kernel, report a kernel bug.
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/reporting-bugs.html

Then you can try to figure it out yourself. Start here, its a list of the file changes for the version 2.6.13:

http://www.kernel.org/diff/diffview.cgi?file=%2Fpub%2Flinux%2Fkernel%2Fv2.6%2Fpatch-2.6.13.bz2

Or look at the source here:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/

Of course, redhat may have made its own modifications. Then you have to get their versions of the kernel and run diff on it, or maybe redhat has a CVS or subversion of its own kernel stuff set up with a handy diff web interface. Or something. Maybe you can figure out what they changed in the driver code between .12 and .13, then you can write a patch for it.

Of course you need to figure out what drivers your system is using first. You can try this by looking at your bootup log, its in a different spot on every system but im sure some redhat genius can tell you where it is.

Then you can start sprinkling 'printf' and so forth into those drivers in the .13 verison, and/or using a kernel debugger, hoping of course that any timing bugs you accidentally introduce dont destroy all the data on your disk by screwing up the bookkeeping of the filesystem. I suggest an extra hard disk, only 80 bucks at the local chinese sweatshop outlet mall.. i mean compUSA.

Whats that? you dont know how to program? its not hard.

all you have to do is learn C, the architecture of the kernel, filesystem, disk driver subsystem, etc, and get a machine to play on so that when you destroy the data it wont matter.

Here is a good start:

1. C for dummies
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568849397/104-0486351-0897546?v=glance&n=283155&v=glance

2. C a reference manual by harbison and steele
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0133262243/104-0486351-0897546?v=glance&n=283155&s=books&v=glance

3. Linux Device Drivers from Oreilly
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596005903/104-0486351-0897546?v=glance&n=283155&s=books&v=glance

4. Linux Kernel Development
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0672327201/104-0486351-0897546?v=glance&n=283155&%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

That ought to get you started. After a few hundred hours (what? you probably wasted that much time playing vendetta) you should have a pretty good idea of what is going on.

after you have known the kernel guys for a few months, they might accept your patch.

Thats the beauty of open source! It's so easy to fix it yourself if something doesn't work.

Not that I should respond to trolls, but here's my response to you ananzi:

Say Windows XP SP3 breaks SATA drives. Then there's exactly nothing you can do about, eh? At least you can, if so moved, do something in Linux. Or just go back to 2.6.12. If you upgrade XP and it breaks, you can't just boot into the old kernel. You need to boot to the prompt (OH NO! WINDOWS HAS A PROMPT! IT'S A LIE!) and restore the old kernel, then reboot again, and hope Microsoft releases a fix. So, please, kindly stfu.

Rogue lazer, I think you are forgetting that Windows comes with a 'digital nervous system' for your house, and with technical phrases like that, you never have to worry about anything. Does Linux have a 'digital nervous system' for your house? I dont think so. I rest my case.

PS. If you want to know what an item in /dev/ means, you can look in the source tree under Documentation/devices.txt,
online this is here:

http://lxr.linux.no/source/Documentation/devices.txt

http://lxr.linux.no/source

(ok that website is only 2.6.11 but /dev doesnt get changed that often)

/dev/sda is not SATA it is SCSI.

apparently fedora core has decided his computer is SCSI one day and IDE the next day.

If you would like to buy me an emachines laptop exactly like yours, fedora core 4, and the books that i listed but cant afford, id be glad to hunt down the problem in more detail. It should only take me a few months.

But Im sure someone else on here can give better information.

Actually, I use a few different OS's around the house, namely:

Windows XP (my gaming desktop)
Fedora Core 4 x86_64 @ 2.6.12 (on the laptop in question)
Fedora Core 4 i586 @ 2.6.13 (on one desktop)
OS X Tiger on my Powerbook that I carry around for fun
Solaris on my old Sparc5

Secondly, I did scour the internet for the problems. If you read my post, you'd see that someone with similar problems recommended adding hda=noprobe to the kernel parameters. This caused a Kernel Panic for me.

Thirdly, I do keep all the kernel sources on my hard drive and compile my own drivers (mostly for my wireless adapter) and I really can't justify spending the time to diff a bunch of code to figure out what MIGHT be the cause and spend hours recompiling my kernel over and over

Forthly, I am very apt at C and C++ and kernel architecture isn't over my head, it's just more than I care to pump into my brain.

I wonder why 2.6.12 and below is showing SATA drives as SCSI drives. 2.6.13 setting it as /dev/hda makes more sense than /dev/sda. Yet, still major disk access issues. Oh well, another peice of the puzzle.

Either way, my post was not a cry for help, it was merely an 'off-topic' exhaust of frustration. Had I actually required help, I may have chosen the 'Linux' forum.

But, ananzi, your posts are slightly more than condescending, whether they are in humor or not. You should stop waving your ePenis around because I'm sure all would agree that it's not that big.

once the last linux zealot is washed away from the internet, once the last linux shell corporation has stopped stealing from shareholders, once the last linux moron tries to force government or business to 'banish all unclean solutions', then i will stop talking about it. When ESR stops being respected for his non-work, and when Linus and a dozen others are punished for insider selling of stock that they purposely hyped beyond its legitimate value.

if you had as big a ethingy you would realize that you dont need to recompile the entire kernel in order to recompile the disk drivers, compile them as modules and reinsert them into the kernel. of course this may require a RAMonly run or a separate hard disk. but even if you did need to recompile the whole kernel, modern computers can do this in 5-10 minutes.

between 2.6.12 and 2.6.13 i would wager not much was changed in the files you need to worry about, you dont have to diff the entire kernel just the drivers or detection code in question.

its not my fault if you dont have the guts for open source. go back crying to microsoft!

So you gonna fix it or what? /:)

Cheer up, emo kid, there's more stuff in life than being a condescending brat.

forgive me i woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

what i meant to say is linux is great, buy me a laptop, ill solve all your problems.