Hard Disk Gone Bad

[EdLeafe]

Recently I was zipping up some files, and typed an incorrect file path. As a result, it tried to zip my entire disk, starting at '/' - not what I intended.

I tried Ctrl-C, but it ignored it. After a short while it froze. I left it for about 2 hours, but the system would not respond to the keyboard or the mouse (clock was still running, tho!). I pressed the reset button on the computer, and it could no longer find boot info on the hard drive. I then rebooted using the boot floppy, and that worked until it tried to mount the filesystem. I got a series of errors that read "hda: read_intr:status=0x59", followed by a "kernel panic" message.

What options do I have now? I searched the web for info, and found a suggesstion to use: e2fsck -y /dev/hda3, but I just get a message "Could not find kernel image: e2fsck". I tried running the RedHat 7.1 installation CD, using the "linux rescue" option, but that just sits at the "Running ananconda... please wait" prompt indefinitely.

TIA for any suggestions.

-- Ed Leafe

 

[marsd]

That is a rather large problem.
Do you have a backup? because i think you are looking at data loss now, regardless of how you try to proceed.
if you managed to boot, say from ramdisk, with a kernel image
(like suse uses for their install) you could possibly try to unzip the fs on the root partition or restore your backup.
But due to the problems you encountered on system freeze there may be collateral damage as well.
The more i think about it the more i would just restore my backup and never work as root again when using a file compression utility.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,



As marsd says, this sounds fairly nasty and possibly fatal. It may be a hardware failure with the drive or part of the drive. You can try toms root/boot disk (

http://www.toms.net/rb/)

which should allow you to boot and run a number of utilities. For example do a 'fdisk -l /dev/hda' to see if the partition table looks OK. If you get something hopeful try to fsck the partition(s). I rather suspect that these will not work, however, because there is probably a fairly major problem with the drive or at least one of the partitions.



I'm assuming you have nothing else but linux on there thats working - if not let us know. Otherwise, it is just conceivable that there is a loose connection somewhere so there's nothing lost by opening the case and re-connecting the ribbon cable, etc.



On the '/' backup - this would go strange to say the least when it got to the /proc filesystem which doesn't really exist (its a 'window' on kernel memory). The results would be unpredictable shall we say....



Anyway, good luck & hope this helps