Some notes on problems in A/UX

[Jim Rosenberg]

>From article <6836 at well.UUCP>, by pokey at well.UUCP (Jef Poskanzer):
> When I was using pre-release A/UX, I would typically reboot once or twice
> a day.  fsck would find and fix a problem about on about half of these
> reboots.  Maybe once in two weeks, it would do a double reboot as you
> describe above.  And twice in N months, it went into continuous reboots.
> fsck would claim to have fixed the problem, reboot, and then do exactly
> the same thing again.  When I showed this to a wizard he mumbled something
> about fsck not flushing all its buffers -- sounds pretty dangerous to me!

I probably shouldn't stick my nose into this, since I don't have a Mac II and
don't run A/UX.  But it seems to me that the better part of wisdom in dealing
with fsck is to know how to boot a "lifeboat" UNIX system from a floppy, and
fsck your "raw" hard disk root file system while it's *UNMOUNTED*.  This would
allow any number of passes through fsck without any auto reboots.

Unfortunately, there are more versions of UNIX on personal computers than you
can shake a stick at that *DON'T TELL YOU* how to create a bootable floppy.
If your A/UX documentation doesn't tell you how to run fsck with your hard
disk off-line when working with a bootable floppy, scream like hell.  There
are cases where booting the floppy is the only safe thing to do, unless you
simply decide to bite the big one and restore the whole damn disk from
floppies.
-- 
Jim Rosenberg                        pitt
Oglevee Computer Systems                 >--!amanue!oglvee!jr
151 Oglevee Lane                      cgh
Connellsville, PA 15425                                #include <disclaimer.h>