I've found "mv" to be dangerous.  Yeah, I know, "now you tell me".

I've actually had quite a bit of problems when I first soft-modded my Xbox, with needing to format my E: due to hard drive corruption.  Thank Goodness that Evo-X has a hard drive formatter.  (All references to Evo-X in this article refer to EvolutionX's RemoteX dashboard build 1.8.3752, which is not the latest release now.) For a while I blamed the corruption on the mv command, then I started to question using rename when FTP'ing to EvoX.  So then I started to suspect that both mv and Evo-X's FTP server may call a common API in the kernel that is used when renaming files on a FATX drive.

Anyway, to this day I am pretty paranoid about hard drive corruption, especially when writing to the C: which I don't want to format, and I do almost all file maintanance using one of the following, in order, based on what is possible: 1) MS Dashboard.  2) Evo-X's copy ability using a copy line in the evox.ini file.  3) AvaLaunch's file manager.  4) If all else won't work, then AvaLaunch's ftp server.  (So to delete a file, I tend to avoid using the ftp server for the actual delete since that can be done with the file manager.) Results since I've started doing this: No hard drive corruption.

I read on some discussion (the minutes of the 3rd developer's meeting of some guys at the Xbox-Linux.SourceForge.net, if I recall correctly) and the result of the discussion was a consensus that yeah, they really need to be finding out what's going on with the problems with the FAT-X driver.  Because of that, perhaps unjustifiably (especially if this is old), I haven't trusted ANY Linux on my Xbox.  (I ESPECIALLY do not trust the 1,316,895 byte DEFAULT.XBE using the 4,112,384 byte BOOT\KERNEL and 885,961 byte BOOT\KERNEL, 3 files included in the 4,964,708 byte 007 Agent Under Fire Linux package called 007linux-xbsaves.zip.)

I am not the only person I know to have had hard drive corruption.  Fortunately my friend also was paranoid about writing to his C:.  He did not want to lose his E:, but he did wisely back up just in case, and ended up formatting and restoring it.  If I recall correctly, he was using Linux, but originally thought that the problem was with Evo-X's FTP server's mkdir and/or rename (he was using a different ftp client, my ftp client couldn't mkdir with Evo-X's FTP server, but at that time I was pretty afraid of using rename), and that he then started from scratch but later had problems and eventually concluded that he didn't trust the current Linux FAT-X driver.

I have found that hard drive corruption results in duplicate files or directories, and other files not showing (noticable in Linux ls, and also in Evo-X one Skin would show up twice in the list of Skins while another Skin wouldn't show up at all), files becoming undeletable, and often dozens of directory entries with NULL (basically non-existant) names which are undeletable.  When a file or directory is undeletable, all parent directories are undeletable in Linux or AvaLaunch's File Manager or any FTP server I found, the only cure was Evo-X's formatting the drive.

If hard drive corruption wasn't noticable right away, further disk activity (reading and writing) on the drive often made the corruption become more noticable.

I've been eagerly awaiting evolution of the hard disk checker built into the most recent versions of AvaLaunch.  Meanwhile, if anybody has noticed any corruption on the E:, I would immediately back up any and all files that you can, then format the drive with Evo-X, then copy all the files back.  To copy files to my hard drive, so that I don't have to tediously make all kinds of directories using AvaLaunch's File Manager and the XPad instead of a keyboard (even though I am borrowing a USB keyboard I could use), I often create a zip file on my PC, making sure the Zip File has the right directory structure I want, and then I have AvaLaunch extract that Zip file.  Based on my experience, this works with no problem, except that due to laziness I often don't copy as many files back to the E:.

If I *had* to make a directory without using AvaLaunch, I would make E:\Backup using Evo-X's HDD Backup option, then use Evo-X's FTP server and rename the E:\Backup directory.  I would call it E:\Media, then make E:\Backup and then rename it to E:\Backup\widgets, etc., as needed to install AvaLaunch.  I would then put the files into those directories as needed, as well as Phoenix BIOS Loader 1.3 (since the older version didn't require the \Bioses subdirectory) and put Evo-X on the C: (and evox.ini) so I could boot a signed Phoenix BIOS Loader which could then boot C:\evoxdash.xbe which could then execute E:\avalaunch.xbe (using Evo-X's ftp server and the literal command "execute E:\avalaunch.xbe", see the "literal" command in Win9x's FTP.EXE or QUOTE in WS_FTP or who-knows-what in other clients), then use AvaLaunch to delete all the extra hard drive files that got placed in any directory that was made by renaming E:\Backup.  I've resorted to this a few times, fortunately I haven't noticed any C: corruption, thank goodness I was very paranoid about writing to my C: during those earlier days when I had a lot of hard drive corruption.

I don't see why there would be any problem with the F: either, I don't know about the C: or any LBA drive like a G: drive though.  If I had problems on my C: I would... uh... worry, and probably just avoid making any writes to the C: (except to go into Evo-X's settings and tell it to stop using Items.txt, thinking that would help prevent Evo-X from writing to that file more often) until I had an opportunity to restore my hard drive from a known, good, working image or until some HDD fixing tools come out.


http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?act=ST&f=45&t=108427&s=7d19369ce650c3ed362b4af9eebfeaae



[QUOTE=animous,Oct 1 2003, 08:09 PM]the xbox-linux folks are working on bettering the fatx module.[/QUOTE]

I didn't say that they are.  I didn't get that impression from the discussion I read.  I got the impression that they decided it is necessary for someone to work on bettering the fatx module.  That's different than saying that anybody volunteered to actually do this necessary work.

"He explained that the old FATX driver caused very bad cluster chains, usually broken and not restoreable."  This was said at [URL=http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/docs/minutes3.html]http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/docs/minutes3.html[/URL] ("Minutes of the Third Developer Meeting").  Also said is that some software that was being made to help fix errors "is not ready" and other software to check for errors "is cool, but there are moments when it crashes too."

  (and when looking at the actual conversation ( http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/docs/meeting030331.html ) ), Franz mentioned that the checker froze, then mentioned "and this is very very bad")



audio flaw:
http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?act=ST&f=45&t=108553&s=7d19369ce650c3ed362b4af9eebfeaae