Bad Sectors, Pear, Qemu and Darwin

I obviously have a faulty hard disk on my hands, the log files say this is a kernel bug, reiserfs faq says it's a hardware fault. The latter is most definitely the case, but hope springs eternal in the human heart so it's tempting to upgrade the kernel and hope it will go away. Well it did go away after an fsck but that doesn't mean the bad sectors have gone away.

One thing leads to another, having upgraded the kernel, the Qemu accelerator no longer works. So it's time to recompile the qemu. Last time I had a few problems with that, but I blogged about it so this times all the trouble could be avoided simply by reading up the old posts.

Then I learn that there is a new version of Darwin available. I tried opendarwin about one and a half years ago (and that was installed with pear PC but not qemu). Interestingly enough, pearPC, which I thought had been abandoned has seen the release of a new version. With apple opting to go with Intels instead of powerPC chips for the new Macs, the days of PearPC will sadly be numbered.

Getting back to Darwin; Not being a mac expert, I cannot really tell the difference between Darwin and Open Darwin but decided to try my hand at Darwin 8.01. The most recent version is 8.4, but an installation CD is not available. Thought to install with Qemu first up to avoid a reboot.