23 November, 2007

OpenSolaris Not Yet Ready For My Laptop

Recently, I blogged about the disaster that I experienced regarding the ext3 file system and concluded that I would want to try the Zettabyte File System on Solaris.

I have an HP Pavilion dv5600 laptop.

I downloaded and installed the Solaris Express Developer Edition on my laptop. This Solaris version is based on breakthrough development of the OpenSolaris operating system. But after trying it on my laptop, I learned that it doesn't support my HP laptop hardware yet. The Indiana OpenSolaris Developer Preview did not give me a good luck either.

Another operating systems that make use of the ZFS are the FreeBSD Alpha and the Mac OS X Leopard. I don't want to use FreeBSD which has the ZFS because it isn't stable yet. Mac OS X Leopard is too expensive for me; I can't afford it.

So, what now? I'm back to Linux. Linux is the best open source OS as far as the firmware/drivers is concerned. My Ubuntu Linux runs almost perfect on my HP Pavilion dv6500 laptop. But as soon as OpenSolaris is able to run on my laptop, I will always be willing to switch to it, only because of ZFS that I've been wanting to experience.

20 November, 2007

The hunger for a bite of Zettabyte

I've been using ext3 as my filesystem of choice since I touched Linux sometime in 2004. And I've never been very disappointed until now. There was a time that I thought that reiserfs is better than ext3 so I switched, but this reiserfs betrayed me when it's journal got corrupted and I could no longer recover my data. Badly irritated, I switch back to ext3 and I'd been so happy using this ext3 until yesterday.

What happened yesterday? I booted Linux, entered gnome, opened nautilus, then my computer hanged. I couldn't use the keyboard and mouse so I forced a shutdown to my computer by pressing my computer's power off button. And surprised! My computer don't boot anymore. GRUB was giving error 17.

What did I do? I downloaded Ubuntu Live-cd and patiently waited for 8 hours for the download to finish. Then I borrowed my friend's laptop to burn the ubuntu iso image. I burned it and booted it and run it. And from the running live-cd, I googled for troubleshooting the GRUB error 17 and found out that the ext3 partition of my hard disk no longer contains a readable data. I googled again and again but found no appropriate solution. When I realized that I've already spent half of a day googling and reading solutions but finding no real answer, my last resort was to follow someone's suggestion and that is to use the fsck utility.

I run the dangerous fsck....

done...

I rebooted but now GRUB gives error 15. I booted from the live-cd again to see what's inside the "rescued ext3 partition". To my surprised, the ext3 was then able to be mounted. I thought my problem was already fixed. But when I looked inside the partition. I was shocked. It only contains a single "Lost+Found" folder that contain full of directories and files with names I can not understand. Where's my data!!!! I shouted.

After all the hassles and boring journey of trying to rescue the corrupted
ext3 filesystem, my reward is a "lost of data" award. I lost the files that I've been keeping since 2001. I lost the project files that I was currently working on. Can you imagine how miserable life ext3 gave me?

Dismayed, breathing deeply and with crossed eye brows, my only solution was to reinstall a new OS. The data that I lost from that corrupted ext3 is a big pain in the a$$.

"If I'm going to install a new OS, what would it be?" I asked myself. I remembered there is a filesystem that they call as the Zettabyte File System or ZFS. I think it is the best file system available today. It is the default filesystem of any opensolaris distribution. It's maybe the right time to try opensolaris and take advantage of its ZFS goodness. What I want about ZFS is its ability to self heal and its defensive and careful approach to managing data. I hope, with ZFS, I will never experience again the same trouble that ext3 gave me.