I’m running OpenSuSE 11.1 64-bit with all patches applied as of yesterday. I know it is all there, because I deliberately applied all patches before getting ready to perform a full image backup. That’s when I found Dolphin has a critical failure.
My USB drive needed to have some old backup images deleted from it before I started another backup, just to be safe. I started nuking them via Dolphin…then realized Dolphin doesn’t have an option to nuke without moving to trash. Once the process of moving multiple 4Gig files to trash starts, you are pretty much screwed. I decide to pass the time reading and responding to email in KMail.
The USB drive decided to have a communications hiccup during the move to trash. Dolphin hung the entire system. No problem, I thought, I’ll just reboot.
Should have been warned about thinking I guess.
/home wouldn’t pass boot fsck. To add insult to injury, I need the emails from this week and this is a Terabyte drive.
I tried booting via the original installation DVD to run FSCK manually as instructed. Lots of trials and failures. Now the / partition can’t complete booting. I have even tried SystemRescueCD, but it doesn’t play well with whatever OpenSuSE does to partitions.
Any attempt to run fsck on the /home partition just dies. When I use -C -V -y I see it get to 20.8% and just hang. Hard hang. Reset button time.
I am somewhat at my whits end. I seriously need the new emails from the last time I backup up last month. (I normally perform a full image backup each month.) I’m making one last ditch effort using Partition Commander to slide the troubled partitions to their smallest possible size to see if I can get the installation DVD to fix everything at that point.
This entire problem was caused because Dolphin didn’t have an option to nuke without moving to trash. It also doesn’t have any kind of recovery process built into it for when removable devices decided to disconnect themselves. We used to have this problem constantly with SCSI devices when cables were getting flaky…Why isn’t Dolphin handling this situation???
Anyway, if the powers that be here have additional thoughts on getting my system booting again AND salvaging its current / and /home partitions…I’m listening.
That’s not good. All I can recommend is running a livecd then mounting your /home partition to try to recover the emails. Also, to nuke files without moving them to trash hit shift+delete.
I’m with Ian. Use a live cd to access your /home. Personally I would use knoppix, but that’s me.
If you can access it successfully, I would backup any important stuff. You may end up re-installing and formatting /home too.
It’s true, there is a delete context in Dolphin once you enable it in the settings.
There is no love. I’m trying to restore from an 05/10/2009 backup to at least get part of my email back, but the past two critical weeks involving a seriously hosed up book printing job will all be gone.
I guess I should expect the poor functionality of Dolphin and the wize-arsed answer about shift-delete as a natural consequence of letting non-professionals release software into the world.
Forcing a manual enabling of a regular delete is a serious design flaw. Adding insult to injury is the fact no senior level architect or developer was obviously consulted because when a user is selecting multiple 4Gig files to delete, Dolphin just blindly starts moving them to trash rather than prompting the user with an option to delete without saving, or at least telling them than hours are going to be wasted moving these files to trash and asking them to confirm.
The real killers is that we have had to deal with disconnected devices since the days of SCSI, yet Dolphin wasn’t designed to handle a lost cable packet. In the world of USB drives and eBay special enclosures randomly dismounted drives and random lost packets are a more common occurrance than ever before. Releasing software which is capable of corrupting an entire partition when this happens is simply irresponsible.
> I’m running OpenSuSE 11.1 64-bit with all patches applied as of
> yesterday. I know it is all there, because I deliberately applied all
> patches before getting ready to perform a full image backup.
heh! that is exactly backwards!
was it running good yesterday, before the update? then, THAT was when
you should have done the full image backup…
or, do you not know that every update is another step toward SLED 12,
and may or may not introduce a new, strange problem? (yes, the new
problem might be fixed tomorrow…)
imo, the latest openSUSE release is “bleeding edge” software and
should not be used on “production systems”…AH, i see in your later
post “Releasing software which is capable of corrupting an entire
partition when this happens is simply irresponsible.” which leads me
to believe that you think openSUSE 11.1 is an enterprise level
software release…wrong…like Fedora, it is another small step
toward a commercial product (SLED/S) which you should be using for a
“book printing job will all be gone.”
now, to be fair: if as a seasoned_geek you used SuSE 9.x or before
they WERE stable and dependable and maybe in the years since SuSE
became openSUSE and SUSE 1x you missed the change that Novell is
involved…
if you want stable, usable, and mostly dependable use 32 bit v10.3
(and NOT KDE4)…
if you want stable/dependable, buy SLED/S 1x (or CentOS, or i hear
Slack and Debian are still a solid, production level environment…)
I bailed on Ubuntu to come back to SuSE. This time I obtained OpenSuSE instead of spending my $100/yr or so to get commercial SuSE. I firmly believe both would have had this problem because Dolphin wasn’t tested by its developers.
64-bit Ubuntu is about as stable as gasoline vapors around arc welders.
I guess I should expect the poor functionality of Dolphin and the wize-arsed answer about shift-delete as a natural consequence of letting non-professionals release software into the world.
You may be right about Dolphin. However, you might like to be a little more generous than your snooty comment about shift-delete. IIRC, it’s been in use since Windows 95 at least, and I use it on most occasions even on 4Gig files.
There is a big difference between “in-use” and “requiring manual configuration prior to being usable”.
There wasn’t anything snooty about the comment. B.S. and/or B.A. degrees teach people how to program, not how to develop software. It’s not until a programmer spends time in the field under the tutelage of Data Architects and Systems Architects that they learn how to develop software. It’s neither right nor wrong, it simply is.
What is currently killing OpenSource software is the growing number of “I’ve just learned how to program” group joining in and releasing stuff sans the tutelage and oversight. Manual activation for “Shift-Delete” is only one small part of the design problems. Accessing disk drives in a manner which doesn’t allow for failed communication is a much bigger problem.
Design Rule 1: If it’s connected with a cable, it will have communications trouble, plan for it.
