At 03:54 07/03/01, Ben Greear wrote:
>Alan Cox wrote:
> > Its not a bug. As the system administrator you reconfigured a hard disk on
> > the fly and shit happened. The hdparm man page warnings do exist for a
> reason.
>
>I'm not arguing it was a smart thing to do, but I would think that the
>fs/kernel/driver writers could keep really nasty and un-expected things
>from happenning. For instance, the driver could dis-allow any new
>(non-hdparm) writes while hdparm is doing it's test. Or maybe the driver
>could realize it was being told to do something that would break and just
>not do it?
No. This would be against Linux/Unix philosphy of giving you enough rope.
Maybe I want to break my hd? You never know. Or maybe the same commands
work perfectly well on a different hd/controller? In general, if you don't
understand the consequences of something you want to do, then *don't* do
it! Or at least have a backup handy and don't complain afterwards...
>Considering this disk is my root disk, is there *any* safe way to test
>out hdparm on this disk?
Of course. Boot/change into single user mode, sync, and remount any
readwrite mounted fs readonly. Then it should be safe to check things out
with hdparm, at least I have done it this way for ages and never run into a
problem even though in my early stage of hdparm experimentation I would
cause kernel crashes more often then not... Chances are that if readonly
works fine, so will write, so once I find the fastest settings that still
give 100% reliability on reads I switch back to normal network multi user
mode and try read-write. Never failed me so far but YMMV, so keep a backup...
Best regards,
Anton
-- Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @) Linux NTFS Maintainer / WWW: http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-ntfs/ ICQ: 8561279 / WWW: http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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