Sysinstall automatic filesystem size generation.

[Paul Mather]

On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 03:11 +0200, Matthias Buelow wrote:
> BTW., when have you last seen a broken NTFS? While
> I don't do Windows much, I have had quite a few crashes on Windows
> (2000, XP) over the years on various machines, and I always asked
> myself how it could be that the system is up almost immediately
> (probably due to log replay) with no discernible filesystem damage.
> Windows (NT) has been doing the write barrier flush tricks (disabling-/
> reenabling the cache for flushing it) for longer than Linux and I
> would think that this contributes to the fault resilience of NTFS.
> Not that I would imply that NTFS can't be corrupted, of course.

Funny you should mention it, but the last time I saw a broken NTFS was
back in July.  It was a friend's Windows 2000 system.  The net effect
was that the system would not boot fully; was not responsive to the
"repair" option; and wouldn't allow the recovery console to start.  In
the end, a wipe and reinstall was necessary.  Oddly enough, trying to
mount the NTFS file system via a Knoppix CD before resorting to that
yielded complaints about the journal being corrupted.

I guess I must be lucky because I've never yet had a corrupted file
system with softupdates enabled due to power loss or panic under FreeBSD
(though I've experienced plenty of power losses due to the flaky power
here and panics due to tracking CURRENT on my desktop system:).

By reading your regular dire warnings on the subject, my experience must
differ greatly from yours. ;-)

BTW, if you consider softupdates fundamentally broken wrt data
integrity, why don't you post your concerns to -current or -hackers,
say?  Surely the developers to address the problem are more likely to be
found reading there?

Cheers,

Paul.
-- 
e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

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