Re: [tlug] Has my machine been cracked?

["Ulrich Plate" <plate@example.com>]

Jim O'Connell wrote:

> I'd advise copying *anything* you need off that disk as soon as
> you get it mounted and forever eye that disk with suspicion.

Which brings me -- this is my lunch break, far away from home, you will
excuse both the deliberate bending of the original topic and the
non-TLUG-approved mail client I'm using :) -- to a question that's been
causing me a little bit of a pain in the gulliver for a week now: How can I
make sure I'm having hardware problems (read: disk kaputt) as opposed to,
say, a buggy IDE controller or some software that likes corrupting
filesystems?

I've stuffed one of Jonathan's sayonara leftovers, a 6 GB IBM drive, into a
beige G3 desktop Mac, as a slave drive on the primary IDE bus. After much
fiddling and giggling about mistakes Macintosh newbies tend to make, I've
successfully installed Gentoo on that same disk. Everything worked
wonderfully and without so much as a glitch, until suddenly I'm getting init
segfaults and ambiguous redirects and whatnot. fsck (presumably -a and -p)
did remedy this once, but everything went back to its sad brokenness after
the second reboot.

I'll eventually have to figure out what's happening by myself, but what I
need right now are recommended diagnostic tools that could tell me whether
a) the Mac IDE controller just hates the idea of a second disk on the bus so
much it kills it at irregular intervals, or b) the disk is simply past its
prime and slithering towards the trash can. This will significantly
influence my choice of getting either another disk or a PCI IDE
controller...

Jonathan, I should have relieved you of your SCSI disks, too... 20/20
hindsight. :(

Cheers
Ulrich Plate <-- currently 8 hours behind y'all