Hey ho.

I have a slowly dying hard drive on a laptop. Each time that fsck
runs, it finds more bad blocks. I tried wiping the thing clean and
installing Slack 9.1 on it, hoping that the problem was transient
(after all, who ever heard of a hard drive dying one block at a time
over a period of months and months?) but it didn't work. The
installation dies at some point, due (I assume) to errors in the
drive.

Hard drives for laptops are expensive, I've learned. Well over $100.
I don't want to spend that much on a laptop whose main purpose is to
provide an upstairs computer for me. I really just want a laptop I
can put a wireless card into and use around the house.

So, I thought to myself (which is my favorite way[1]), what if I
install as little software as necessary to get the PCMCIA wireless
card running and then mount everything else I need remotely? The hard
drive is failing slowly enough that it just might work for a while
that way. Even if it eventually fails, I could use a boot CDROM to
take over and do the same.

Now I want some advice. How do I go about preparing for this? I have
glanced at (but not yet studied) the Diskless HOWTOs, but I'd like to
know if there are any special issues where wireless is involved. Has
anyone around here done this? Any surprises or pitfalls to avoid?

Thanks.

Footnotes:
[1] Apologies to Martin Mull.

--
Jesse F. Hughes
"Truth is common stuff, ready to your hand, but lies you have to make
yourself, and you can't be sure they are any good until you've
used them --- and then it's too late." John Steinbeck

Jesse F. Hughes wrote:
>
> I have a slowly dying hard drive on a laptop. Each time that fsck
> runs, it finds more bad blocks. I tried wiping the thing clean and
> installing Slack 9.1 on it, hoping that the problem was transient
> (after all, who ever heard of a hard drive dying one block at a time
> over a period of months and months?) but it didn't work. The
> installation dies at some point, due (I assume) to errors in the
> drive.
>
> Hard drives for laptops are expensive, I've learned. Well over $100.
> I don't want to spend that much on a laptop whose main purpose is to
> provide an upstairs computer for me. I really just want a laptop I
> can put a wireless card into and use around the house.
>
> So, I thought to myself (which is my favorite way[1]), what if I
> install as little software as necessary to get the PCMCIA wireless
> card running and then mount everything else I need remotely? The hard
> drive is failing slowly enough that it just might work for a while
> that way. Even if it eventually fails, I could use a boot CDROM to
> take over and do the same.
>
> Now I want some advice. How do I go about preparing for this? I have
> glanced at (but not yet studied) the Diskless HOWTOs, but I'd like to
> know if there are any special issues where wireless is involved. Has
> anyone around here done this? Any surprises or pitfalls to avoid?

Can you boot from a KNOPPIX or Slackware live CD and zero the
hard drive then run badblocks on it in read/write mode to see how
bad the drive is?

Just a thought not a fix.
--
Confucius: He who play in root, eventually kill tree.
Registered with The Linux Counter. http://counter.li.org/
Slackware 9.1.0 Kernel 2.4.22 SMP i686 (GCC) 3.3.2
Uptime: 36 days, 3:55, 4 users, load average: 1.04, 1.10, 1.0

In alt.os.linux.slackware, Jesse F. Hughes dared to utter,
> Now I want some advice.

Sounds to me like you want a Linux Terminal Server. Check out
http://www.ltsp.org. It allows you to setup a single server to assign
DHCP addresses, tftp over a kernel image to a diskless client, NFS
mount a / directory on that client, and run all applications on the
server (there are also patches/config options to allow you to run
applications on your local machine). That would allow you to boot your
machine from a floppy drive, dowload and NFS mount everything you
needed, and then work happily away. You may wish to find out if there
is a floppy boot disk with support for your wireless card though. I
have never tried this with wireless.

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jesse@phiwumbda.org (Jesse F. Hughes) wrote:

> (after all, who ever heard of a hard drive dying one block at a time
> over a period of months and months?)

That's very common. Once a drive starts developing bad sectors it just
spreads like a cancer. Anytime you start getting increased bad block
counts,
you must start looking for a replacement drive.

- --
George Georgakis - geeg AT tripleg net au - http://www.tripleg.net.au/
SlackBuild Central - http://slackpack.tripleg.net.au/

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