Re: Laptop mode causing writes to wrong sectors?

[Jan Niehusmann <jan@gondor.com>]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2005 at 03:27:00PM +0100, Bart Samwel wrote:
> OK, that's the second report then. I'm beginning to worry. :/

And I'm not feeling so lonely any more ;-)

> Bradley, Jan, since when have these problems been happening? Kernel 
> version-wise, I mean?

I didn't notice these problems before 2.6.14. As these corruptions are
not happening very often, and as I usually do not run the notebook on
battery power, the problem may have existed for a while, though.

Today I did a simple test: I activated laptop mode with a 10s idle
timeout, and made a script write files with uniqe identifiers, followed
by a sync, every 60 seconds. After nearly an hour, I didn't see any
corruption, though at least some of these writes have triggered
a spin-up. When I have some spare time I'll do more intensive testing.

Additionally, I mounted more than half of the partitions on this
notebook read only, and made a 1:1 copy of these partitions to an
external hard drive. Therefore, I can check later if something
accidentally did write to these areas.

If you have any suggestions for additional test, please tell me.

The random filesystem corruption had one positive effect: I never had
such a good backup of my data before. ;-)

Jan