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<p>My dear Maemo friends,
<br>
<br>On my N900, I use the <i>Debian chrooted system</i> but I <i>very often run into troubles</i> with it.
<br>
<br>To read quickly, go after the words <i>in italics</i> ;-)
<br>
<br>I just need to compile the <i>Lazarus Free Pascal IDE</i> for my device and/or to <i>develop applications with it.</i>
<br>Sometimes it happened when I had Debian in an image file that <i>my N900 suddenly crashed and switched off</i> during the installation of some packages into Debian. So I ran fsck, expecting some damage to the filesystem in that image file. But the corruption appeared so heavy that it was <i>basically unrepairable.</i>
<br>This happenened <i>very frequently</i> so I started to keep a backup of the standard 2GiB image. Still, the loss of work was <i>very annoying…</i> it’s a bit time consuming to backup 2GiB of data after each single step, don’t you think so?
<br>OK, I thought it was better to use a physical device, an MMC SD card. So <i>I’ve formatted an 8GB card to ext3</i> and <i>copied</i> all the contents of the Debian image onto it using rsync.
<br>I’ve then modified the /home/user/.chroot configuration script accordingly.
<br>All has worked fine except that during installation of the compiled Lazarus (make install) <i>a copy command has frozen for all the night.</i> That was strange, so I pressed <i>Ctrl+C with no effect.</i> I tried to <i>Close Debian.</i> <i>It has also hung.</i> So I’ve turned my device off.
<br>OK, the first run of fsck on /dev/mmcblk1p1 has just <i>recovered the ext3 filesystem journal.</i>
<br>I’ve been curious then if there were some errors left there, so I’ve run <i>fsck -f /dev/mmcblk1p1. Ouch! A destruction of the fs again!</i>
<br>
<br><b>The side question:</b>
<br><i>Is it a good idea to check an ext3 filesystem right after a journal recovery? Or should I first mount it?</i> I’m apparently lacking an essential knowledge here.
<br>
<br><b>The main question:</b>
<br><i>Is it possible to avoid severe filesystem damage</i> during just normal but io-intensive operations <i>on the Debian for armel on the N900?</i>
<br>
<br>Thank you in advance for just any hint!
<br>
<br>Pavel Řezníček</p>
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