One or two years ago, we needed more space on one of our servers which was already physically full. We plugged in an external USB drive (actually a Maxtor drive inside an IDE/USB box). Since then, we often lose the drive. Kernel can no longer read partition table. We then need to power cycle the drive to get it back but the server is 800Km away from us.
The strange part is that almost everything is still there, but shifted by 16 bytes ! The MBR is not ours (instead of having LILO string, we can read Invalid partition table.Error loading operating system.Missing operating system).
We tried a lot of things on the USB side without effect (reset, disconnect, change power state, ...).
Today I made some experiments regarding the 16 bytes issue :
losetup /dev/loop0 /dev/sdc -o 16 allowed reading the partition table again.
losetup /dev/loop0 /dev/sdc -o $((63*512+16)) and the vgscan found the volume group !
I can see the data on the disk, however I still could not mount the partitions. Kernel says scsi3 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device (Update: this issue was because I don't masterize lvm, after cleanly doing everything, it works fine with this trick...).
It looks like this is a Maxtor issue as the other reports I could find were on same model of Maxtor disk (B200P0), but even if some people see it under Windows they only replied us that they do not support Linux. I also found another report under Debian.
If someone has an idea regarding what's going on, we're really interested :-)
The machines used by zarb.org (PLF, Jpackage, EasyUrpmi, this blog, ...) need a new sister.
The main machine with 6 Xeon 700 (donated by HP) works fine, but people buying new machines mostly get x86_64 and PLF still don't own x86_64 build host.
We had a look at prices and we can get something for about 1500 at Dell. The machine admins are ready to pay about half of this money but since the call for donations on zarb-user list, we only got 15.
So, if you use and/or support PLF, we are interested in either a x86_64 server, some reduction on a server or your money :-)
By updating gnome-power-manager package to 2.17.4, I just did the commit number 100000 in Mandriva svn \o/
Before...
Villacampa [pterjan, i'm interested on sending money with a bank transfer, could you give me the IBAN, please?]
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ovgjcbst xmetj [pmjdz qtxop ynvlrxwe yfhptkocs frxmjoy kybnqcfpo astujd http://www.wvyu.jflgkmc.com]