3rd Fedora disk curdle

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Gerard J. Cerchio wrote:
> In the short time I have been working with olpc I have had my Fedora 
> VMware machines curdle their ext3 disks 3 times.
> 
> I have been running 2.4 and 2.6 Redhats and Debians for over a year with 
> no such problems. Once the first Fedora 7 machine broke its disk I have 
> been very careful to shutdown every time. I cannot point to any 
> particular activity that has corrupted the disk image. Things will start 
> to go "wrong" and a subsequent reboot with fschk will yield a disk 
> hopelessly in trouble.
> 
> Does the jhbuild emulator do any exotic direct to disk IO that may be 
> causing this?
> Does Fedora aggressively modify its ext3, vfs or SCSI drivers?
> 
> I have built a third Fedora 8 VM this time using IDE disk IO in hopes 
> that this problem will go away.
> 
> Has anyone else seen this kind of problem?

1. Define "curdle their ext3 disk".
2. What version of VMware are you using?
3. What's your host version?
4. Are you using the default settings on your virtual disks or are you
changing them in some way?

My answers to 2 - 4:

2. VMware Workstation 6
3. Gentoo Linux on an AMD64 (Athlon64 X2 dual-core with 4 GB of RAM)
4. No ... I turn off the snapshots and make my virtual disks independent
and persistent, and I turn on write caching.

I have built virtual XOs, virtual Fedora 7 and 8 systems (32-bit!!), and
jhbuild inside a virtual Fedora 8 system, all without any data
corruption. The XOs I build with IDE drives because they won't boot from
a SCSI drive -- "hda" is hard-wired somewhere that I don't recall off
the top of my head -- but all the others use SCSI drives with no problem.

So the first thing I recommend is to check your hard disk settings in
VMware. The defaults *should* work without incident, but the snapshot
logic may be doing something to you.
> 
> -Gerard
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