nfs@notecnirp.Princeton.EDU (Norbert Schlenker) (02/05/90)
In article <5275@star.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes: >I think that would be unwise. You might miss comments like: DON"T RUN >TEST20 ON YOUR HARD DISK. IT WILL WIPE IT OUT... >... > >Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl) Just out of curiosity, was this comment ever posted before? I finally got around to running all the tests on Friday; lo and behold, test20 wiped out my hard disk. I discovered just how inadequate my backup system really is! I didn't lose any data, since the test seems to wipe out inodes in sequence and I killed it before it mashed the whole disk. All my recent work remained accessible, although the directory structure was a bit hard to navigate. My problems had to do with my failure to think hard about what I would need in case of a hard disk failure. Since I had a backup from just before I upgraded to 1.5.0, and a copy of my entire library on my DOS partition, things weren't too badly damaged. But I didn't have a simple boot disk (with compress, ar, ln, rm, mkfs, etc. on it) that would help me get a working system running again. The recovery thus took the better part of 4 hours, intermittently booting 1.3 to get yet another utility off an original distribution diskette so that I could continue. What a (self- inflicted) pain! I learned two lessons: Don't run test20, and think again about backup requirements. It looks like a practice failure is a good thing once in a while. Norbert
ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) (02/06/90)
In article <23723@princeton.Princeton.EDU> nfs@notecnirp.UUCP (Norbert Schlenker) writes: >In article <5275@star.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes: >>I think that would be unwise. You might miss comments like: DON"T RUN >>TEST20 ON YOUR HARD DISK. IT WILL WIPE IT OUT... > >Just out of curiosity, was this comment ever posted before? Yes. There was a whole discussion about it for a while. Bruce Evans finally figured out what was wrong and I fixed it. The current test20.c, which will come with the next cdiffs, is safe. Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)