Bad Hard Drive???

[gretchen]

I have no clue what's causing this so I hope I put it in the right place and please excuse the vague subject line.

Today when I went to use my computer some of the commands were gone. I would try run a program and it wouldn't start. From the command line all it would say was Segmentation Fault. I couldn't start konqueror so I tried ls and not even that would work. I tried to restart and the reboot and shutdown commands also gave me a Segmentation Fault. I tried to reboot manually and it would get to where LILO is supposed to come up and then would just be a blinking underscore curser.

Booting with Knoppix gave me four partitions (I have three) none of which would mount. It gave me an unknown filesystem error.

This has happened to me once before and I fixed it by writing zeros to the drive, formatting it with a windows cd, and then installing Linux. However I lost all my data.

Could it be that something repairable has just gone wrong with the partition table or LILO and it's all still there?

it's a 7200RPM 60GB maxtor hard drive
512MB of RAM
SuperMicro motherboard

[gretchen]

I've figured out that the superblocks are bad on my partitions.
e2fsk -b doesn't work. I've tried block sizes up to 2097663 because I don't know what my block sizes are.

When I run fdisk, I get a message about the number of cylinders being set to 7299. Does that make a difference in block size?

I can't find anything to help if you can't get e2fsk to work so basically I'm looking for a data recovery program that will work in this situation. I have it all backed up except for ONE file with some financial stuff in it that I don't want to lose.

[error27]

This probably won't work, but you could boot with knopix and just grep /dev/hda for information from the file...

Worth a shot at least.

[gretchen]

I couldn't grep /dev/hda cause I couldn't mount it.

So, I brought my drive into work, hung it as a slave on a windows machine, and used r-linux (http://www.r-tt.com/RLinux.shtml) to recover my data. It found my file undamaged.


Now, why did my superblocks go bad?

[bandwidth_pig]

I've had that happen before and found out there is nothing wrong with the drive. Yet, there was no way to fix it in Linux. I had to reformat the drive and once I did everything was fine.

[MkIII_Supra]

What file system are you using? Sounds like ext2fs. If so then use either ext3fs or better yet, ReiserFS. I haven't had a bad superblock error in the 2 and a half years of using ReiserFS. And I have yet to have my system not recover from even a power failure shut down.

Also when you go to rebuild the system try this config (tweak the sizes to fit your needs)

60GB

Partition Size File System
/boot 15MB ext2fs
/ 2.5GB ReiserFS
/usr 15GB ReiserFS
/var 1GB ReiserFS
/home 4GB ReiserFS
/opt 10GB ReiserFS
/Document 5GB ReiserFS
/Images 5GB ReiserFS
/RPM 2.5GB ReiserFS
/TAR 2.5GB ReiserFS


This is somthing like what I have been using for, well since I started using Linux 4+ years ago. Works for me. So if you end up fraggin your system so bad that you have to re-install you lose nothing because all you important data is on partitions that you will never format.

Here is my configuration right now:

Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 1248 178 1070 15% /
/dev/hda10 6040 801 5240 14% /Applications
/dev/hda11 4093 476 3409 13% /Documents
/dev/hda12 5099 420 4680 9% /Images
/dev/hda13 4032 617 3416 16% /Software
/dev/hda14 12793 1 12793 1% /Win2K
/dev/hda8 3318 183 3136 6% /home
/dev/hda9 6150 789 5361 13% /opt
/dev/hda6 8519 2808 5712 33% /usr
/dev/hda7 1365 97 1269 8% /var
shmfs 252 0 252 0% /dev/shm


**NOTE** the Win2K partition is for my VMware config files, if I ever get VMware to work with SuSE! **END NOTE**