Linux and Windows don't get along

[Chaotic42]

Hey guys.

Whenever my Linux installation (Debian untesting, linux 2.6.6) crashes due to the wlan driver (which is pretty often), not only does it crap all over itself (it won't unmount anything, it becomes unresponsive, etc), but if I start Windows up after I reset, Windows only sees one processor. I have to physically turn the computer off after booting to Windows, then boot to Windows again for Windows to be able to use both processors.

Has anyone else had this problem?

 

[Smilin]

There are certain things that don't get truly 'reset' during a warm reboot that do during a cold boot. Joystick ports, PCI bus and a couple other things come to mind. I'm not too surprised that you might need a cold boot.

Although not conclusive this does kinda point to a possible hardware issue as the source of your wlan problem.

 

[KF]

Yeah. I hate it when that happens Like when only 7 of my 16 processors are available. Life is hard in America, ain't it

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: KF
Yeah. I hate it when that happens Like when only 7 of my 16 processors are available. Life is hard in America, ain't it

I'm not saying that I'm worse off than someone with no limbs, I'm just asking a question.

 

[n0cmonkey]

If you start Linux after the reset does it do the same thing?

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
If you start Linux after the reset does it do the same thing?

I don't know. It always just fscks the root partition and resets. *Then* it works.

 

[drag]

I've never had that problem, but I can see how it's possible.

Wireless/PCMCIA cards are weird, it's probably the drivers causing a misconfiguration in the card and the card is crashing your computer that way. Thru a soft reboot the card is probably retaining it's settings, so when you go thru a warm reboot the card's state hasn't changed any and is still locked up when you try to use it in Windows.

Kinda like what happens when you just yank the card out while it's "hot", sometimes it'll crash the computer, sometimes it just scrambles the card a bit, sometimes it does nothing and everything works.

To fix it I'd probably look at fixing those Wlan drivers. On my PCMCIA card using a Fedora kernel 2.6.7 (not sure if it's official or what) it would lock up my system if I tried to make to many changes (like change the frequency or change the mode from ad-hoc to managed) it would complain that the "mgnt" something isn't responding and eventually it would cause a kernel crash, which obviously would take out my computer. A warm reboot is enough to fix it, though. (in kernels 2.6.6 and 2.6.8.1 it seems to work great)

It shouldn't be to hard to get it stable.

 

[Nothinman]

I can't say I've ever had my Linux box crash from the wlan driver (using wlan-ng or the orinoco_cs driver with a prism2.5 PCMCIA card) and back when I used to run Windows on my SMP box alongside Linux I never noticed Windows not seeing both CPUs. I would say you have a strange hardware quirk, it would be nice if Windows would tell you what's going on so you could see why it only brought up one CPU but that's probably too much to ask.

I don't know. It always just fscks the root partition and resets. *Then* it works.

Stop using ext2 so you can skip the fsck and reboot step.

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Stop using ext2 so you can skip the fsck and reboot step.

What do you use? I've been curious about other FSes, but I haven't messed with them.

 

[Nothinman]

I use XFS on most of my filesystems, but on the non-x86 architecture boxes I stuck with ext3 because it was the safe choice.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

You have basically nothing to lose to convert to ext3.

tune2fs -j /dev/hdXX

vi /etc/fstab
:%s/ext2/ext3/g
:wq
reboot

 

[drag]

hehe don't use ext2!

2 main choices nowadays. XFS and Ext3. Then a couple others that are still widely supported such as JFS and ReiserFS.


XFS is good for when dealing with large files, it's very high performance for a stable FS. Ext3 is nice because it has backward compatablity with Ext2, which means that almost every OS/software under the sun can deal with ext2 (unless of course your dealing with Windows).

Also you can upgrade old Ext2 filing system to ext3. You don't even need to reboot (although if you don't do it while the filing system is unmounted it can't make the journalling file hidden).

tune2fs -j /dev/hda1

And that will turn a ext2 into a ext3 filing system. Of course your computer will have to have support for it, but I don't know of any modern Linux distro that doesn't support ext3. Then you have to edit your /etc/fstab directory and tell the OS that it's ext3 instead of ext2.

Personally I use XFS on most everything.