Is Slax much slower from USB?In general, Slax is
faster from USB than from CD. You just have to use the
right USB key. Older devices (usually for USB version
1.1) are really slow and will make you troubles. Even
reading from such devices is slow. Newer devices work
just fine with Slax, and those with 'ReadyBoost' are
the best ones. I've seen booting from SanDisk Cruzer in
less then 40 seconds to full GUI, with no further
slowdowns even during the system operation. What can make your USB flash key corrupted?In general, all
filesystems are predisposed for data loss in bad
situations. If you unplug the USB key from your
computer before Slax finishes its shutdown procedures,
or if you poweroff the computer while Slax writes
something to the device, you may lost data or get the
entire filesystem corrupted. FAT filesystem (widely
used on almost all USB flash keys, MP3 players and
Cameras) is the most vulnerable one. Anyway, if a
filesystem gets damaged, it's not permanent. As you may know, USB
flash keys have individually erasable segments, each of
which can be put through a finite number (for example
100 000) of write cycles before becoming unreliable.
Conventional file systems like FAT or ext2 were
originally designed for magnetic disks and as such
rewrite many of their data structures repeatedly in the
same place. The damaged segment can't be recovered.
This type of corruption is permanent. To avoid filesystem
damages, always make sure to shutdown or reboot
correctly. If you boot Slax from a different device and
use the USB key only as a storage medium, always make
sure to unmount it properly before unplugging. If you
can, use some journaling filesystems (like XFS) instead
of FAT or ext2. And always use only devices with
support for 'wear levelling', designed to distribute
the re-writes across the medium, in order to prolong
its life. How to fix a corrupted filesystem?As mentioned in the
previous section, FAT filesystem is the most
vulnerable one. If Linux detects a corruption, it will
remount it read-only to prevent further damage. To fix the problem,
use: dosfsck -wa /dev/hdb1 Replace hdb1 by your own
partition name, of course. If you get an error message
that there are differences between boot sector and its
backup, don't worry about that, it's not any problem.
The utility will simply skip that and will continue
fixing all the other errors. |
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