Questions about disk drives under the UNIX and Linux systems. See also the "filesystems" tag.
1
vote
1answer
30 views
How to realign a disk on logical volume with minimum to zero down time
A system running un-align disk partition that needs to be aligned without loss of data on all the partition including mbr with the minimum to no down time.
3
votes
1answer
74 views
What's the easiest way to decrypt a disk partition?
I made a mistake of encrypting the entire LVM physical volume (contains both home, root, and swap) when installing a CentOS 6.4 (2.6.32-358.6.1.el6.x86_64) box. I soon came to realize that moving ...
0
votes
1answer
37 views
Disk Partitioning - Can't create partition
I've been following this example to restore capacity to my microSD --> SD card corrupt and stuck at 32MB, any way to fix it?
Everything seems to work until I get to
mkfs /dev/sdx1
It tells me ...
1
vote
2answers
145 views
Any programs suitable for making a database over disk-content?
I have quite a lot of external hard-drives, and often have a hard time finding what I'm looking for - not to mention not storing the same file several times on different drives or finding free space ...
2
votes
2answers
88 views
How to use DD to clone a partition off a disk image?
I have a disk image, it's a "whole" disk image, e.g., contains multiple partitions, and I want to clone just one of them (not the first one..) onto a partition on an external drive with multiple ...
0
votes
0answers
18 views
Backup Creation failure
When I try to make backup through the backup tool in Linux Mint 14 (Nadia), it shows the following message in the form of dialog box:
Backup failed.
Permission denied when trying to create ...
4
votes
3answers
97 views
Is there a good drive torture test tool?
I have been having odd and rare filesystem corruption lately that I suspect is the fault of my SSD. I am looking for a good drive torture test tool. Something that can write to the whole disk, then ...
1
vote
0answers
41 views
Block Devices & Partitions
I partitioned a microSD card (mmcblk1) into two partitions mmcblk1p1 and mmcblk1p2.
If use a dedicated card reader I am able to see the entire SD card and its partitions using various disk management ...
1
vote
1answer
40 views
Keeping disk caches when hibernating
Is there a way to keep disk caches when hibernating Linux? I understand and agree that dropping them is the best option all-around. But my system is unresponsive after resume and I would like to give ...
13
votes
3answers
261 views
Horrible situation - file systems mounted simultaneously by multiple independent OS instances
How do I get out of this situation safely?
Details are as follow:
A xen server has got block devices allocated to VMs. But these devices have also been mounted inside Xen.
In fact 44 of these ...
1
vote
0answers
32 views
Reasons for choosing primary over logical partitions [duplicate]
I guess anyone knows the benefits of logical volumes. But are there any reasons why I should choose primary partitions if I can?
1
vote
2answers
78 views
Cant format external drive
I am trying to format an external drive, but getting the error
/dev/sdb1 is apparently in use by the system; will not make a filesystem here!
Based on the internet, I have:
run cat /proc/mounts:
...
1
vote
1answer
57 views
Really umount external drive
I had a USB drive mounted on /dev/sdb1 and I want to reformat from NTFS to ext3. I did umount -l which unmounted the disk. I deleted the old partition using cfdisk. I ran mkfs.ext3, but got the error:
...
1
vote
1answer
218 views
UUID Of A drive that won't show up in /dev/disk/by-uuid or blkid
I have a USB drive that is not receiving a UUID. When I look at the contents of the /dev/disk/by-uuid it doesn't exist there. The dev point that the partition lives in is on /dev/sdb. I am able to ...
4
votes
2answers
508 views
Linux Mint freezes on startup
Premise
I am running Linux Mint on my sister's computer. Everything was working fine, but than one day she turned it on and she got a strange message she didn't understand. I think it was some kind ...
0
votes
1answer
96 views
Using SAR to monitor free disk space data
Is there a way to make sar (from sysstat) collect free disk space data?
2
votes
3answers
145 views
Can I create a software RAID 1 with one device
I have a single disk that I want to create a Mirror of, Lets call this disk sda I have just bought another identicle size disk, which we can call sdb. sda and sdb have one partition called sda1 and ...
1
vote
0answers
669 views
How to set up ZFS with ZIL and L2ARC SSD?
I have been considering bcache and flashcache.
However my friend suggested me something called ZFS. In fact it says that formating disk with ZFS can actually do the exact same thing without kernel ...
1
vote
3answers
67 views
Bad sector on a directory
I've a bad sector on my /home/xyz which make a folder with 10 GB data unreadable. As far as I can see in syslog there's only one badsector with may destruct 4K of data while I have no access to 10 GB ...
7
votes
8answers
487 views
How to determine which sd* is usb? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
How to know if /dev/sdX is a connected USB or HDD?
The output of ls /dev/sd* on my system is -
sda sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sda5 sda6 sda7 sdb sdc sdc1 sdc2
...
2
votes
2answers
80 views
Why I have two /dev/sdx entries with a single disk?
In my laptop (running Linux) I have only one SSD, connected to the SATA3 port.
Why I have two sdx entries in /dev directory?
In particular I see /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, and /dev/sda is the SSD:
# ...
3
votes
1answer
1k views
/dev/sdb: No such file or directory (but /dev/sdb1 etc. exist)
I'm not sure what is wrong here but when running fdisk -l I don't get an output, and when running
fdisk /dev/sdb # I get this
fdisk: unable to open /dev/sdb: No such file or directory
I'm ...
4
votes
2answers
95 views
Determine which process is taking most of disk bandwidth?
When the HDD indicator is blinking (for a long period), how could I know which process is taking most disk bandwidth?
12
votes
6answers
3k views
How can I monitor disk io?
I'd like to do some general disk io monitoring on a debian linux server. What are the tools I should know about that monitor disk io so I can see if a disk's performance is maxed out or spikes at ...
1
vote
2answers
174 views
RHEL 5.5 - Need to refresh /dev/disk/by-label links
I've added a fibrechannel disk to a RHEL 5.5 server. The disk is present and shows under /dev/sdxx - But I need to give udev a kick and have it refresh the /dev/disk/by-label/LABEL links; this is ...
0
votes
1answer
953 views
Resize non-LVM ext4 root partition
How can I shrink/resize a non-LVM ext4 root partition?
The problem is I can't unmount it and I don't have physical access.
0
votes
1answer
292 views
How to resize root Volume Group
How Can I reduce size of root volume group?
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
I just have SSH access to Linux host.
2
votes
0answers
110 views
Setup Cloudmin on Centos installed in LVM
I installed CentOS 6 with default LVM partition pattern. according to this pattern Can I use Cloudmin and store KVM Disks in LVM as Logical Volume? I think Cloudmin requires creating new logical ...
2
votes
1answer
930 views
Unable to create logical partition with Parted
I was fiddling around with parted command on a loopback disk and tried to create some partitions using gpt part table but I keep getting Error: Unable to satisfy all constraints on the partition. when ...
2
votes
3answers
181 views
Disk size management
I am using Fedora 16. My /dev/sda2, mounted on / (root) with something like 50G got filled 100%:
[foampile@~ 13:13:39]> df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs ...
8
votes
3answers
325 views
Physically break into box? (Memory & disk)
I have a VPS. I might be able to encrypt my partition but I havent tried. My VPS company I believe can reset my root password although the only SSH key I see is my own. With all my data I have it ...
3
votes
1answer
1k views
recovering ext4 partition after dd'ing over start of HD
I accidentally used dd and wrote over the first 208MB of my external disk. What I wrote over is a partition on its own (Debian nestinstaller) so what I see now is not my old (now damaged) ext4 ...
0
votes
0answers
35 views
Ubuntu eucalpytus cloud, Unable to see the volume from within a running instances after attaching
I am facing a rather strange issue when it comes to attaching EBS volumes to running instances.
We have a cloud with 2 monster machines (say NC1 and NC2) and one moderately powerful machine ...
4
votes
3answers
1k views
Is it safe to resize partition on /?
I currently have a 600gb disk, with Ubuntu installed, 600gb of which is given to the Ubuntu OS:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 592G 16G 547G 3% /
udev ...
3
votes
2answers
57 views
How to get size of data that haven't been written to disk yet?
In some programs percentage of copying large files get to 100% very fast and then I'm waiting much more before it goes next step.
It's caused by buffer. How to I see amount of data that are going to ...
2
votes
1answer
365 views
What could cause a NAS mount to respond slowly?
I've a directory on a NAS mount (from NetApp), that contains ~6300 image files, total size of this directory is ~ 300 MB. I get two different performances of time ls:
First time (or after waiting 5-7 ...
6
votes
2answers
3k views
How can I safely remove a SATA disk from a running system?
I sometimes need to plug a disk into a disk bay. At other times, I have the very weird setup of connecting a SSD using a SATA-eSATA cable on my laptop while pulling power from a desktop.
How can I ...
2
votes
3answers
70 views
Single machine with two disks
I have two disks on my local computer, so when you write to these disks simultaneously, are changes writting to them serially or in parallel?
6
votes
2answers
247 views
Does the position of partition on disk affect speed?
If I put /var as first partition, then /home and /, will the partition for /var have better performance than if I put other partitions close to head of the disk? Will the disk sector position matter?
...
