Mrs. Entropy: Unnanny::08.05.2007+17:53
After the recent rebuild of my personal server, Mrs. Entropy, I had been getting strange hard drive read errors and the root partition would remount itself as read-only. I would have to reboot the server twice, once to manually fsck the partition (it was ext3), and again to actually start it up. This was starting to wear extremely thin on me, as it’s not worth having a server if it needs to be restarted twice every day. So, having had prior, good experience with the XFS filesystem, I decided I’d switch my two ext3 partitions over to XFS (/boot and /).
For those who don’t know, unlike in Windows where you can convert FAT32 to NTFS, it’s basically impossible to convert linux filesystems back and forth. So, I ended up having to copy my / and /boot partitions to one of the other partitions. I converted them one at a time, and did the /boot partition first, but forgot to re-install grub (it has to be reinstalled so it knows that the partition is XFS). Ironically, the Gentoo install CD saved me there (I switched the server from Gentoo to Debian during the rebuild). Switching over the / partition went without a hitch, and the server’s now up and running again.
I’m not positive what was causing those read errors. It could be that that hard drive is bad, or something else. The funny thing is, I haven’t lost any data. So I guess for now I’m going to ignore them. If they manifest further, then I’ll take action. Right now though, I’m just happy that it’s stable again.