Ubuntu Ext4 Tragedies....

[FreyGrimrod]

So I was fool hardy and upgraded to Karmic and wow has that been a terrible experience. I was used to every update breaking nvidia drivers (which I got worked out under karmic and was no longer happening) only for the mouse to start breaking constantly and under karmic you can't do anything from command line to get to a non gui run layer I was having to do ridiculous grub work arounds and then the old command line tricks still didn't work. The vast majority of my data is now stuck in ext4 in only one location (rather than the usual two plus) this has me uncomfortable. I am currently downloading a x86_64bit Fedora 12 live cd hoping to burn that and give it a go as the ubuntu karmic live/install dvd crashes horrifically.

My desktop hardware is a Tyan K8N?-SLI mobo with a 1.8Ghz Opteron 4gigs of ram dual 6600LE nvidia's. I have one Terabyte drive now running 32bit XP not calling on all my ram running NTFS but at least more things can read that. I am attempting to pull my approximately 550gigs of data in EXT4 out of that file system. I am so sick of file system nonsense thought this had all been worked out when Windows could read Ext2 and Linux NTFS. I hadn't realized until it was too late that I missed downgrading my 4th attempt at the upgrade to ext3 sans journaling.

I have a Dell D810 laptop running XP pro that I am writing this from and a 250gig external drive. (Though I've considered buying a third matching terabyte drive for the external they had been in raid 1)

Can't we all go back to Fat? hehe.....

Any insights comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated thank you for your time.

[stoat]

Hello FreyGrimrod,

To me, your problems sound less about the ext4 filesystem and more about updates, nvidia drivers, and your mouse. But I have to admit that I'm not ready yet for ext4 myself. I tried it when Fedora 12 was released. It worked. But I spent too much time worring about it because of things I had been reading. I re-installed Fedora in ext3 partitions. I'll deal with it later.

Anyway. Back to your files in ext4 partitions. Maybe the Fedora 12 LiveCD will boot and run okay on your hardware. If it does, then you can mount those ext4 partitions and transfer your files to some other safe location. Then regroup, rethink, and find a distro that you like (maybe Fedora 12) and install it using the filesystem you like.

[FreyGrimrod]

Thank you stoat seems to be the plan for this evening. Wish me luck.

[FransR]

Want to share with you that Fedora12 implementation of Ext4 is working fine for me. Have done multiple implementations with it. It is a dream to see this, and we have to thank the Fedora Teams for this distro.

How to upgrade from other Distro's is another matter, and I am sure requires preparation time and careful planning.

Good luck.:)

[dragonbite]

Ever since I started doing fresh installs with Ext4 once it was the "default", I haven't had any issues with it. This also includes when encrypting the hard disk (in Fedora) or just the /home partition (in Ubuntu).

I must be thankful, though, because my laptop doesn't have Nvidia or ATI, and 99% of issues I read about seem to run one of those brands.

[rockdoctor]

FWIW, haven't had a problem with ext4 in either Ubuntu or Fedora. Now, as for the nvidia drivers - occasional big-time problems that totally screw up X. Got Karmic working and haven't messed with updating it since. As for the current Lucid alpha, I just booted compiled the nvidia driver myself (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-beta-195.30-pkg2.run) patched to work with kernel 2.6.33. I compile the same driver file for Fedora (F13 and Rawhide).

[dragonbite]

FWIW, haven't had a problem with ext4 in either Ubuntu or Fedora. Now, as for the nvidia drivers - occasional big-time problems that totally screw up X. Got Karmic working and haven't messed with updating it since. As for the current Lucid alpha, I just booted compiled the nvidia driver myself (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-beta-195.30-pkg2.run) patched to work with kernel 2.6.33. I compile the same driver file for Fedora (F13 and Rawhide).

Are nouveau drivers available? Just wondering whether those are more stable than the proprietary drivers.

[FreyGrimrod]

So I got a matching third terabyte drive in from new egg and dropped Fedora 12 onto it from the live cd and was a bit irked that it would only allow installation in ext4 but not having access to a dvd burner on any machine but the one I was trying to get running and no other iso's around etc. I went for it ran great for about a week rescued all my data from the ubuntu drive...... and I come home turn the box on and it's dead.... so I'll have to figure this one out in time but damn I had been a happy linux user for years I hadn't even run updates before turning it off I think I installed open office presentation was the only change.... at this rate I'm considering buying a horrifically overpriced Mac and dual booting windows 7....


Fedora 12 functional and gorgeous for 6 days 22 hours now back to stuck in ext 4 :-P

[FransR]

Hi FreyGrimrod,
If you have the $ to buy MacOs Windows7 etc.. you should do it immediately, it will save you the time on Linux and the ext4 file system. However you may have similar problems with the MacOs in other areas.
Running a OS from an external hard drive as I understand your configuration setup has always been a high risk factor. Good luck with your Systems.

[BrianMicek]

I'm not clear if this helps, but I have a 5 TB RAID6 that is encrypted running ext4. I set it up the day that Fedora 11 was released; which was our first chance to use it, because I have absolute confidence in the maintainers of ext[234]. I have no complaints at all about the filesystem.

Off the topic, I can say I also run XFS and really appreciate its performance and its reliability. I use it on a RAID0 and also on my laptop that has a slow spinning disk. Ext4 doesnt seem to perform as well as XFS ... I might be wrong and I might be biased. Its really unfair, but if I had the same confidence in the XFS guys as the ext[234] guys, I'd be an XFS kind of guy.

[FreyGrimrod]

Well thank you all for taking the time to read my whining. As for the money thing well I have two copies of windows 7 but need newer hardware to get driver support. (3.6 year desktop and 4.6 year laptop) so based on the age of the hardware I've known it's getting to be time. I have just been trying to hold out as long as possible as computer hardware tends to degrade in use value almost as quickly as the software bloat that causes it. Also I tend to be most comfortable under a linux os these days but afraid it is time to go back to playing nice with the rest of the world. Thank you all for your time I'll have to go back to fiddling with w/e is crashing it on boot at a later date.


Oh and I must say Fedora 12 user experience whole different ballpark from Ubuntu. I never even had to install the nvidia driver native support for multiple monitors even adding them on the fly! AMAAAAZING (just had to spread a lil fedora love)

[FransR]

We have some luxery from a hardware perspective to play around with different vendors hardware. But we have tried not to loose contacts with the last hardware generations. If you want to try new hardware specs on the cheap, I recommend to buy an ACER ASPIRE one for about USD 300. It works excellent with Fedora 12 / 13. Installation of software modules to support MP3 lincenses is a bit problamatic but achievable. Fedorasolved provide solutions for this. So yes, the Fedora society needs compliments from their users!! They deserve it!!!!
They definitely have mine.