[SWLUG] Reiser fsck hangs at boot (or: Crap! My drive!)

[Terry John]

>> Can you get it up in maintenance mode, either via cd or floppy. This 
>> will give you a working temporary root filesystem. You can then do an

>> fsck on the umounted, corrupt, root filesystem which hopefully should

>> complete but if not you should be able to try other fsck options
which 
>> may work better

>Ah. This I did. Fsck first time through failed (citing unfixable
errors.) So, as instructed, I ran
>fsck.reiserfs --rebuild-index or some such.
>
>This cheerfully instructed me to buy a new harddrive.
>
>Now the machine will not boot at all, and grub can't even read the
partition any more.
>
>I guess this is fatal?
>
Likely :-( But one last thing you could try, just to save some money,
would be to try a mkfs on your root partition. If the disk is really
broken then it won't help but if the filesystem is corrupt but your disk
is ok, it should reformat it and you can get your root partition back
from your backup. Sorry, no-one does backups I know. I've got callouses
from my crossed fingers too.

But seriously if the mkfs works you can re-install your Mandrake and if
you're careful you can save all the info on all the other partitions.

Talking of which, in maintenance mode you might be able to do backup
copies of all the important configs (if any) or maybe do an fdisk to
create a new partition if there is any space left to copy stuff into so
the install doesn't blow it away despite your best efforts.

Terry

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ - World Wide Wonderland

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