I have a single 120 Gig hard drive dual booted XP and Fedora Core 6 machine. Recently Linux had been running slowly. I restarted, selected the linux side and was shocked to have it fail into a fix disk mode. It suggested that I use fsck. I did and answered "yes" to seemingly thousands of questions. Once finally done fixing errors I rebooted. Now it fails completely. It complains about multiple "dma-intr: error" and {uncorrectable error} The last gasp before terminating says: "not syncing: Attempted to kill init!" Then it hangs indefinitely. No keyboard input has any affect. The XP side of the machine works fine, but it crashes overnight. Where do I start? What do I do? Can I save the linux half of the hard drive? Ken Jones
My knee jerk reaction would be to get a replacement drive. Install Linux on it and attempt to mount the failing drive and see if you can pull off the information that you care about before the whole drive goes casters up. Good luck! On 9/7/07, Ken Jones <kjones@ziplink.net> wrote:
I have a single 120 Gig hard drive dual booted XP and Fedora Core 6 machine.
Recently Linux had been running slowly. I restarted, selected the linux side and was shocked to have it fail into a fix disk mode. It suggested that I use fsck. I did and answered "yes" to seemingly thousands of questions. Once finally done fixing errors I rebooted. Now it fails completely.
It complains about multiple "dma-intr: error" and {uncorrectable error}
The last gasp before terminating says: "not syncing: Attempted to kill init!"
Then it hangs indefinitely. No keyboard input has any affect.
The XP side of the machine works fine, but it crashes overnight. Where do I start? What do I do? Can I save the linux half of the hard drive?
Ken Jones _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug
-- Lee Keyser-Allen (lkeyser@alum.wpi.edu)
On Fri, Sep 07, 2007 at 09:33:21AM -0400, Ken Jones wrote:
The XP side of the machine works fine, but it crashes overnight. Where do I start? What do I do? Can I save the linux half of the hard drive?
It's probably too late. You already have data corruption due to the failed hard drive. First of all, stop using the drive immediately. Get a new one and only connect the old one for rescue purposes, and only try to read from it, not write. You could try using a rescue utility like "ddrescue" or the other one "GNU ddrescue" (yes there are two with the same name) to copy the good sectors to a new hard drive or file, then use a utility like "foremost" to carve the original files out of it if it won't mount normally. If you want to try modifying the copy, make a second copy and always keep the original unmodified copy in case further modifications, fsck, etc. messes it up even more. Next time, make sure to set up smartmontools (smartd) to email you when a hard drive starts to fail, and perhaps get a second hard drive and mirror it using Linux software RAID. If you use Linux software RAID, setup mdadm monitor (mdmonitor) to email you if you have a failed device in the RAID set. These email monitoring steps are crucial, since if you have redundancy, you might not otherwise notice a single failed device until the second one fails, and by then it is too late. I just had a hard drive fail and lost no data thanks to a RAID 1 mirror and mdmonitor/smartd.
participants (3)
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Chuck Anderson -
Ken Jones -
Lee Keyser-Allen