Why do things always break together? (updated)

Last Wednesday I had the idea to install SUSE 9.1 on my machine. Though not SUSE's fault, it sure was the most unpleasant experience since a long time (wrt computers, that is). Apparently, because of the Novell takeover, the SUSE distribution (the physical shipping of stuff) is a bit of a mess. As such I'm waiting for over 4 weeks or so to receive the package on my work, but being eager to see what's in this new distribution I decided to use some copies of the CD's from my uncle and went ahead installing. That is, after I made some tarballs of important stuff and put them on my second HD. During the initial booting of the CD's I noticed the CD worked somewhat slow, the drive was spinning up and down and only slowly the menu appeared. When it was booted however, it worked like a charm. I wiped my first HD, spent some time doing the package selection and started installing. But when the copying of packages started I noticed how slow the CD really was. The drive was spinning and ticking like a mad man and when the first estemated time was shown it said 4 and a half hours remaining. That kinda sucked, especially as it was 1am... So, I decided to abort the install (my drive was reformatted already) and to just install SUSE 9.0 again the next morning. So said and done and the next day I was running on SUSE 9.0 again. Not using the carefully built KDE from CVS anymore, but KDE 3.1, man that was slow! At those moments you realize how many optimizations KDE has had since then. I put back the tarball of my home directory and tried to unpack my /share directory from tarball as well, then tar gave a segfault. Kinda confused I retried the command after which my konsole froze. I opened Konqueror and browsed to the /share directory (which is on a seperate partition) and Konqueror froze. Trying to reboot my entire system froze. Ok, not good. So, I didn't touch the system that much the next two days, living on webmail only, after which I gave the system another shot using my uncle's original CD's. We arrive at Sunday now where I have successfully installed 9.1 on my machine and everything appears to work nicely, until I try to start recompiling KDE. I start with the qt-copy directory from CVS and after a few minutes of compiling I notice a syntax error. Nothing for qt-copy, you'd say. So I opened up the file that bailed out and indeed, there's a syntax error there. However it doesn't look like a human mistake, more like some kind of corruption, like some characters had fallen off. So I removed the file, checked it out from CVS again and now it compiles. This type of corruption then happens two more times. I decide I will do a memcheck during the night and will continue compiling kdelibs now. Surprisingly, a similar thing happens in kdelibs, but when I try to open the file using vi, vi crashes. I go to another terminal to terminate vi, but after entering my username at the other terminal, the terminal doesn't respond anymore either. After switching back and forth between the terminals a few times to see if one comes to live again, the entire system freezes. I decide I better go to bed and leave the machine doing a memcheck. This morning I turned on my monitor and the memcheck was still running, no errors. So I booted the Rescue System from the SUSE CD's and start doing a fsck on my partitions. I check my root partition, no problems. I check my root partition again, no problems. I check my root partition once again, fsck freezes. However as the system is now booted from CD-ROM the rest of the system keeps working and I can login to another terminal. Any attempt of killing the fsck process silently failes. I turn off my machine and replace the first HD with another one I had precautiously picked up from my work this midday. I once again do a reinstall of SUSE 9.1 on the second HD which is now running. And here I am, currently untarring my tarballs once more. Hopefully it keeps working this time. Then I can rush myself to get the KFind patches in and make type-ahead find really powerful. But first I need to get KDE CVS back on my machine again.

Cya soon!

Arend jr.

Update: While rebuilding CVS again, I've already seen one file corruption. There are no other strange things so it might be an incident (though given the history up to now that seems pretty naive). If I keep getting more trouble even with this new HD, it could turn out to be my motherboard (you know, such an expensive intel board) or the software...