PP-E02: problem with frequent power outages

[guiyoforward]

Hi,

I have a nice E02 box, I didn't like the sloppy pogopluug service so I followed the great instructions on this site and went the archlinux way. One of the things I didn't like from the pogoplug was that I am in the third world and there are frequent (twice a week) power outages, and the pogoplug didn't respond well to that - I had to repair hard drive, etc., so it was no use to me.
Anyway, I installed archlinux, the first usb drive was corrupted so it didn't work, I tried another one and even got webadmin running, but a few days later (and a power outage later) it does not boot from the usb drive, just blinking orange light, although if I remove the drive I can still login from putty to a command prompt.
So my questions are:
1-Should I try another usb drive?
2-Is there a way to make the system robust to power outages? It's really a bummer if getting unplugged from AC power fries your system...

Thanks!

[winestock]

Typically OS's like proper shutdown which gives the OS a chance to finish writing out its data. If you run fsck on the HD it will repair it if possible. Given your situation I would suggest that you invest in a UPS battery backup for the Pogoplug.

[guiyoforward]

Thanks! I was thinking about this...
I think there's an issue with the install instructions - something about ext2 and ext3. There's a suggestion here to use ext3 and maybe update the install instructions to reflect this:
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=5028&p=29010#p29010

[jkillebrew]

I'm a noob. I just did a fresh install and wanted to convert to ext3. I followed a tutorial I found on here and the first step is to create the journal. When I tried this, it said the journal already exists. That got me thinking maybe its already ext3, so I just ran this:

pacman -Sy uboot-env
fw_setenv usb_rootfstype ext3
reboot

It boots just fine and uses ext3! Before this I had a corrupted filesystem about 6 times after "proper" shutdowns or accidents. After changing it, I never again had corruption.

[moonman]

It seems like the instructions were changed to create an "ext3" partition. I didn't know as I don't read them every day
Anyway, you just need to change U-Boot variable and that's it.

[guiyoforward]

Thanks everyone! moonman, when you say the instructions were updated, do you mean these?
http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv5 ... s-ui-tabs2
They still don't include the crucial:
/usr/sbin/fw_setenv usb_rootfstype 'ext3'
Can someone add it there? Thanks again