TOPIC: SATA
A case of double vision?
4th November 2009One of the early signs that I noticed after upgrading my main PC to Ubuntu 9.10 was a warning regarding the health of one of my hard disks. While others have reported that this can be triggered by the least bit of roughness in a SMART profile, that's not how it was for me. The PATA disk that has hosted my Ubuntu installation since the move away from Windows had a few bad sectors but no adverse warning. It was a 320 GB Western Digital SATA drive that was raising alarm bells with its 200 bad sectors.
The conveyor of this news was Palimpsest (not sure how it got that name even when I read the Wikipedia entry) and that is part of the subject of this post. Some have been irritated by its disk health warnings, yet it's easy to make them go away by turning off Disk Notifications in the dialogue that going to System > Preferences > Startup Applications will bring up for you. To fire up Palimpsest itself, there's always the command line, but you'll find it at System > Administration > Disk Utility too.
My complaint about it is that I see the same hard drive listed in there more than once, and it takes some finding to separate the real entries from the "bogus" ones. Whether this is because Ubuntu has seen my SATA drives with SIL RAID mappings (for the record, I have no array set up) or not is an open question, but it's one that needs continued investigation and I already have had a go with the dmraid command.
Even GParted shows both the original /dev/sd* type addressing and the /dev/mapper/sil_* equivalent, with the latter being the one with which you need to work (Ubuntu now lives on a partition on one of the SATA drives, which is how I noticed this). All in all, it looks less than tidy, so additional interrogation is in order, especially when I have no recollection of 9.04 doing anything of the sort.
From laptop limbo to a new desktop: A weekend restoration of computing order
12th July 2009This weekend, I finally put my home computing displacement behind me. My laptop had become my main PC, with a combination of external hard drives and an Octigen external hard drive enclosure keeping me motoring in laptop limbo. Having had no joy in the realm of PC building, I decided to go down the partially built route and order a bare-bones system from Novatech. That gave me a Foxconn case and motherboard loaded up with an AMD 7850 dual-core CPU and 2 GB of RAM. With the motherboard offering onboard sound and video capability, all that was needed was to add drives. I added no floppy drive but instead installed a SATA DVD Writer (not sure that it was a successful purchase, though, but that can be resolved at my leisure) and the hard drives from the old behemoth that had been serving me until its demise. A session of work on the kitchen table and some toing and froing ensued as I inched my way towards a working system.
Once I had set all the expected hard disks into place, Ubuntu was capable of being summoned to life, with the only impediment being an insistence of scanning the 1 TB Western Digital and getting stuck along the way. Not having the patience, I skipped this at start up and later unmounted the drive to let fsck to do its thing while I got on with other tasks; the hold up had been the presence of VirtualBox disk images on the drive. Speaking of VirtualBox, I needed to scale back the capabilities of Compiz, so things would work as they should. Otherwise, it was a matter of updating various directories with files that had appeared on external drives without making it into their usual storage areas. Windows would never have been so tolerant and, as if to prove the point, I needed to repair an XP installation in one of my virtual machines.
In the instructions that came with the new box, Novatech stated that time was a vital ingredient for a build, and they weren't wrong. While the delivery arrived at 09:30, I later got a shock when I saw the time to be 15:15! However, it was time well spent when I noticed the speed increase on putting ImageMagick through its paces with a Perl script. In time, I might get brave and be tempted to add more memory to get up to 4 GB; the motherboard may only have two slots, but that's not such a problem with my planning on sticking with 32-bit Linux for a while to come. My brief brush with its 64-bit counterpart revealed some roughness that warded me off for a little while longer. For now, I'll leave well alone and allow things to settle down again. Lessons for the future remain, over which I may even mull in another post...