I haven’t had time to troubleshoot it or get more information, but it appears that the strange errors I was experiencing yesterday after jumping between Crux and Arch were not, as I thought, the fault of retaining the home directory. A wiped drive followed by a standard installation also yielded the same errors on reboot, which had to be overridden by changing the “pass” digit in /etc/fstab.
I don’t have much time over the next few days, but I’ll try to make some headway in resolving what exactly ate half of my music collection and a few DVD rips. But for the moment I will amend my previous post and suggest that perhaps, this time, the fault lies somewhere between Arch Linux, my hardware and bad luck. 😦
What’s the best way to test if the hdd is faulty?
I suppose there are a lot of hard drive test suites out there that would do the trick. To be honest, I’m more inclined to suspect the software than the hardware, mostly because the drive is less than six months old. That, and the fact that it was working fine until I switched the system software. 😐
You can use smartctl to check the SMART values of the HDD. You can also use fsck to check the partition for physical errors.
I did try a couple of passes with e2fsck, but got no errors. Whatever was ailing those inodes, it apparently was some sort of inconsistency between the distros. Sad, but I have no other explanation.
… stray cosmic ray? 😦
I would not rule it out.
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just tried xlinks2 with vgalib 640x480x256… it’s so cool!!!
even got all the smilies and pics on this page as i type.
cool!