From: rab@ariel.its.unimelb.EDU.AU (Richard Alan Brown) Subject: Re: tarring off a dos filesystem ---> uh oh Date: 3 Oct 1992 22:50:27 GMT
Hmmm,
Last week a similar thing happened to me. I had a tar file I had
just copied onto the dos partition, and on tarring it off some ugly things
happened.
I untarred the archive on the dos partition, and copied some of the binary
files into /usr/bin. (The file was the jumptable version of the contents of
usr.bin), I was just tinkering with the binaries and mv'd one (ispell) into
/usr/bin. On typing ispell, nothing happened and so a ctrl-C was in order...
nothing weird happening yet. Now, it seemed that with every subsequent
keystroke, my disk/file system got more trashed. An ls in /usr/bin showed
no files (!) from /usr a ls bin showed *names* of files and some garbage
thrown in. I fscked and rebooted, and the problem got worse, various
binaries (dvips, latex, X, xterm) were broken.
So I backed up my dos partition, and reinstalled completely... not actually
such a Bad Thing ;) I wanted to croak some of the dos partition and free
up some disk space.....
No problems since, but I am wary of doing anything too taxing that
involves the dos filesystem.
my system: 386-40
8M RAM
Linux 0.97pl5
gcc 2.2.2d
X11v2.0
Thanks to all for Linux, we have a sort of 'plague' phenomenon in the physics
department now... we have a 486 running Linux in a fairly accessable place,
and after the initial jaw-drop, more than a few people have been seen
muttering things about buying pc's and installing Linux.. passive publicity
of the best kind! I'd estimate we will have about a dozen or so Linux
installations in the department (Physics... not Comp Sci ;) ).
cheers
Alistair Scott (no I haven't tries to reproduce the corruption problem..
life is too short.)
afs@tauon.ph.unimelb.edu.au