On disk failures

I muttered before about lvm and its lockin. Well I fell foul of it this last weekend. I was using a spare machine to backup most of my work and all the key files from my wifes machine. We were away overnight Saturday, so I switched the server off. Bad mistake. I'd left the old, small disk in, thinking it might come in handy for something. Bad mistake. The disk is about 5 years old and has been run constantly for months, no trouble. When I switched it back on, Linux failed to boot, mismatching the block count with the master info. I tried to fix it using what knowledge I had and the tools offered, to no avail. That meant a re-install. Again I used FC7, this time choosing not to use lvm, which meant setting my own partitions. Away it went (note that at this time I didn't know the small disk was bad) and copied over all the main files. Left me with a prompt along the lines of 'Performing post installation filesystem changes. This may take several minutes'. It's an old machine, so no problem, I waited. And waited. Eventually cancelling the pop-up, I tried rebooting and was promptly landed into the boot loader. Ah well. Three further attempts and I started to think logically, removed the small disk (most likely candidate) and tried again. Yet again the pause for that final stage is enormous. Far too long for the unsuspecting. Black marks for Fedora Core 7. If something is happening the user needs to be told. I'd have thought they knew that by now. As for failing and not even telling the user? I've downloaded Ubuntu for my next upgrade. It won't be FC7.

Lesson? Avoid lvm if you value your data. Nice to add disks! Course it is. Even better if a lost disk means data lost on that disk only.