Re:var keeps going readonly 3363

Jeff

A few thoughts I'm hoping for feedback on.

I've eliminated the disk as being bad...it's been replaced. So now if it's a hardware issue, its either the IDE controller on the MB, or it's a bad cable. So I'm going to try and replace the cable with a new one and see if that helps.

But if it's bad hardware, why would it always impactvar? var is the first logical parbreastion, as the following shows:

Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags 1 0.031 8189.384 primary ext3 boot 2 8189.385 68189.963 primary ext3 3 68189.963 128190.542 primary ext3 4 128190.542 239366.931 extended lba 5 128190.573 136379.926 logical ext3 7 140474.650 156327.824 logical ext3 8 156327.855 239366.931 logical ext3 (parted)

dev-hdb7 on type ext3 (rw)dev-hdb1 onboot type ext3 (rw)dev-hdb2 onhome type ext3 (rw)dev-hdb3 onusr type ext3 (rw)dev-hdb5 onvar type ext3 (rw)dev-hdb8 onmusic type ext3 (rw)

Not being a hardware expert, it seems odd it would always makevar read-only. Why no other parbreastion?

IAC, I'll pick up a new cable when I go to town today. If that doesn't work, I'll leave hda on the suspect IDE controller, since hda has the MBR on it. I can then actually move hdb off the MB completely, to one of my PCI-133 cards that control my other hard drives, and try and boot from there, or I can shuffle things around and boot from the secondary IDE channel on the MB. Is there a reason to try the onboard IDE rather than an PCI card? Realistically, the onboard is only ATA-100, and the Promise card is ATA-133, so I might get better performance off of the Promise card, since the disk supports 133.

Thanks to everyone who has been following this saga and helping. All input welcomed.

~Jeff