From: Michael G Schwern Date: 22:22 on 28 Nov 2007 Subject: Why does one bad drive block the whole operating system? My DVD drive is dying, this much is clear. Put a DVD in and it's like Homer Simpson in a hospital bed. Disk spins up, disk spins down. Disk spins up, disk spins down. After a few dozen cycles of this it will either be spat out or finally mount. Mechanical parts, they wear out. What are you gonna do? The trouble comes when an already mounted DVD spins down to save power, and then tries to spin up again. The up/down/up/down cycle can go on for ten minutes with the OS refusing to stop or eject the disk. That's hateful in and of itself, but like I said, the DVD drive is dying and I can accept that. What I can't accept is that it brings the whole operating system down with it. One by one, each application freezes with the dreaded OS X beachball spinning. Spinning into oblivion. Applications that have no business with the DVD drive. Firefox, Thunderbird... even the Terminal! Everything goes unresponsive while the computer plays Homer with the DVD drive. And this isn't limited to OS X or even DVD drives. I remember a poorly connected NFS mount would bring Unixen to a screeching halt. Or a troubled hard drive would freeze any shell which touched it, locked and unable to be killed even by root. Why, in 2007, is the most unreliable part of my computer cross wired with the most critical part?
From: Peter da Silva Date: 23:15 on 28 Nov 2007 Subject: Re: Why does one bad drive block the whole operating system? On 28-Nov-2007, at 16:22, Michael G Schwern wrote: > Why, in 2007, is the most unreliable part of my computer cross > wired with the > most critical part? Fourth law of thermodynamics: the perversity of the universe increases to a maximum.
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