techThursday, December 22, 2005
A little hard drive corruption
So I resized my partition and it crashed half-way through. I recovered it and did not notice any problems right away - windows booted after running scandisk which did some repairs. Windows seemed to be running normally and everything. I didn't notice any data corruption (I do have a backup just in case).
Then I tried to use my map software. It was totally messed up. The GPS part works fine. It shows where you are, shows the roads, and everything. But it can't find a city if you type it into the route start/stop bars. You can move the map around and find the city, then set it as your start or stop. It also can't seem to find any restaurants or anything.
Alright, this must be caused by some data corruption because it happened right after resizing the partition. That's easy, I got a backup. The problem is that I backed it up to a ReiserFS partition (which is greek to windows). And linux can't reliably write to a (piece of crap Microsoft) ntfs partition. That's not really a problem though because I have a flash drive that's fat32 which both can read and write. But there's another problem. The flash drive is 1 Gb. The map data is 1.6 Gb. I could do it in a few steps, but there's a better way. Instead of using the flash drive, I got rfstool which lets you read a reiserfs partition from windows (It's pretty crude - you can't browse it like a regular windows file system - all access is through a command line tool, but it works) And it worked - the map sofware seems to be working correctly now.
Then I tried to use my map software. It was totally messed up. The GPS part works fine. It shows where you are, shows the roads, and everything. But it can't find a city if you type it into the route start/stop bars. You can move the map around and find the city, then set it as your start or stop. It also can't seem to find any restaurants or anything.
Alright, this must be caused by some data corruption because it happened right after resizing the partition. That's easy, I got a backup. The problem is that I backed it up to a ReiserFS partition (which is greek to windows). And linux can't reliably write to a (piece of crap Microsoft) ntfs partition. That's not really a problem though because I have a flash drive that's fat32 which both can read and write. But there's another problem. The flash drive is 1 Gb. The map data is 1.6 Gb. I could do it in a few steps, but there's a better way. Instead of using the flash drive, I got rfstool which lets you read a reiserfs partition from windows (It's pretty crude - you can't browse it like a regular windows file system - all access is through a command line tool, but it works) And it worked - the map sofware seems to be working correctly now.
