Hi Hilary, On Fri, 26 Aug 2005, Hilary Hertzoff wrote:
I tried this on the x86_64 list, but no one was able to help me and I'm not having any luck with google - I suspect it's a terminology problem.
I had a bad hard drive crash last weekend. KDE froze to the point that I needed to do a hard reboot (the problem turned out to be a memory stick that was loose).
So, essentially, the freeze and ensuing reboot was triggered by a memory problem. I wouldn't call this a hard drive crash.
Tried to repair it using a SuSE boot disk and the repair option under install. This made things worse.
Normally, when you switch off a hard drive it will do a disk check (in your case reiserfsck) before it starts up again. This may take some time depending on how large the drive is. Still it should have come up and run fine afterwards. I am wondering what you did in order to "repair" the problem to make it worse in your opinion.
2 partitions - /dev/hda1 is a linux swap and /dev/hda2 is a bootable reiserfs (kicking myself now that I didn't make home a separate partition).
What are the error messages if you try to mount and it does not succeed?
My current state is that if I try to boot that drive, I get a Grub error 16. I can't get into Grub to edit the boot setup
Not sure what grub error 16 really means but perhaps your MBR was trashed somewhere in the process. I would try to rewrite the boot loader information using yast from the rescue install.
SuSE recognizes the partitions but fails when I try mounting the partition on another drive, repair using the tools under installation or update. I've used a rescue cd to check the disk with fdisk and gnu-parted - they agree on the partitions but gnu-parted is reporting that I have 2 TB of space used on a 163GB partition.
Did you try to repair the partition with "reiserfsck --fix-fixable"? That is the gentle way of approaching the problem. If that doesn't help you may want to try to rebuild the superblock or the tree, depending on the error message you get from running reiserfsck with the fix-fixable option.
I have no clue what to do next. Should I try resizing the partition and hope it "deletes" the extra used space or is there some other way to force a recheck or reindex of the partition.
I would not try to do that. In fact depending on how important the data in your /home directory is, I strongly suggest to use a disk recovery tool like dd_rescue to build an image of the partition someplace else. You can then mount that image with the loopback device and try to recover your data. This would be the preferred way of doing things if the disk is really damaged. Incidentally, I am currently doing exactly this on a Hitachi drive that gave up on me a couple of days ago. dd_rescue and the very valuable dd_rhelp script can be downloaded here: http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/ . They even supply a SuSE binary rpm. The simplest way of using it is via dd_rhelp which is explained here: http://www.kalysto.org/utilities/dd_rhelp/index.en.html . Hope this helps. Best regards, Alex.
System Details: X86_64 on a MSI K8T Neo FIS2R motherboard. 1024kb ram now properly installed and being recognized. The drive in question is made by Hitachi but I don't have the details handy. However, I don't think any of this should matter since the problem doesn't seem to be hardware related.