linux frustrations

[mrsbrown]

Last week T put water in the iron and all the power in the house turned off - twice.

My webserver was a casualty and this evening I finally had the time to try and fix it. Hah!

That hard disk seems to be so crashed I can't mount it under either Knoppix or linux rescue on my Fedora install CD.

Now I'm trying fsck and e2fsck directly on the drive, without mounting it - but they both seem to freeze. It's time to take a deep breath and go to bed, but I seem to keep saying, "I'll just try... and then I'll go to bed". When I run e2fsck on my main linux partition, it says, "recovering journal" and does the hard disk grind for a while, and then stops. I'll trick myself to bed by leaving it like that overnight and taking another look in the morning.

Tomorrow, I'll contemplate taking the disk out of the computer/buying a new hard disk, reinstalling Fedora and then seeing what I can do with this seemingly fucked hard disk. OTOH, if I can't read it with Knoppix, why should I be able to read it with a new install of Fedora?

And no, I haven't had a backup routine.

Comments

[keithlard.livejournal.com]

It may be that the partition table or filesystem superblock are corrupt - this seems to be surprisingly common after backhoe incidents.

If you can 'fdisk' the drive and see what looks like a reasonable partition table, but you can't mount or fsck a given partition, try googling for 'alternate superblock' and see if you can recover it that way.

At the very worst you may be able to do a bitwise copy of the drive with 'dd' and manually extract your data from the bitstream. But it's surprising how often the alternate superblock trick fixes it.

(Oh, and you're right - get some sleep first :D)

[vonstrassburg.livejournal.com]

I second the alternate superblock trick.

If it isn't done by Saturday let me know as I'll be in Melbourne and can have a look.